PBD - Patrick Bet-David - PBD Podcast | Guest: Michael Franzese

Sept. 9, 2021 - PBD - Patrick Bet-David

02:13:48

PBD Podcast | Guest: Michael Franzese | EP 86

FaceTime or Ask Patrick any questions on https://minnect.com/ Patrick Bet-David Podcast Episode 86. Download the podcasts on all your favorite platforms https://bit.ly/3sFAW4N Check out the official merchandise here: https://store.mafiastatesofamerica.com Text: PODCAST to 310.340.1132 to get added to the distribution list The Bet-David Podcast discusses current events, trending topics, and politics as they relate to life and business. Stay tuned for new episodes and guest appearances. Connect with Patrick on social media: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/patrickbetdavid/ Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/patrickbetdavid Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/PatrickBetDavid.Valuetainment About the host: Patrick is a successful startup entrepreneur, CEO of PHP Agency, Inc., emerging author, and Creator of Valuetainment on Youtube. As a natural critical thinker, Patrick takes complex leadership, management, and entrepreneurial ideas and converts them into simple life lessons for today's and tomorrow’s entrepreneurs. Patrick is passionate about shaping the next generation of leaders by teaching thought-provoking perspectives on entrepreneurship and disrupting the traditional approach to a career. Follow the guests: Michael Franzese: https://bit.ly/2YDP2bA Gerard Michaels: https://bit.ly/3fMja9z Adam Sosnick: https://bit.ly/2PqllTj To reach the Valuetainment team you can email: info@valuetainment.com Want Patrick on your podcast? - http://bit.ly/329MMGB #PBDPodcast #MafiaStatesOfAmerica 00:00 - Start 3:00 - Franzese Respects Giuliani 7:50 - Baseball + Steroids 20:08 - Franzese on sit-down/Gravano & Sonny Franzese 32:53 - Mob Movies 35:13 - Kennedy's/Marilyn Monroe 41:53 - PBD and Franzese backstory; PBD interest in mob 53:02 - Why were most mobsters on the political left; Political Corruption 1:06:06 - Anniversary of 9/11, Afghanistan 1:32:00 - Dalio and Soros on China 1:40:22 - Rand Paul and Faucci 1:50:50 - Guiliani on Chin; Columbo boss was FBI informant 1:56:19 - Franzese hit on his life; Fathers Betrayal 2:08:01 - Johnny Light/Johnny Russo 2:10:33 - Mafia States of America Mug

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	Have is that let's not offend the guy.
	Just so you know, folks, if you're listening to this, today, I mean, for 20 minutes, Adam wants us to talk about vaccine.
	Gerard says, I don't want to offend people.
	And they've been going back and forth.
	Adam, I'm telling you, we're not going to do it.
	We're not going to do it today.
	You're going to be okay with that?
	We have a special guest.
	We have a special guest today, Michael Francis.
	If you're excited that Michael is here with us, give us a thumbs up and subscribe to the channel, especially if you want to see Mafia States of America, because that's a project we're going to be talking about today, Michael.
	That's it.
	How you feeling?
	I feel good.
	Yeah.
	I'm in Florida.
	What could be better?
	So it was interesting.
	Yesterday, we're having dinner at Casa D'Angelo, which, by the way, the food legendary.
	Actually, crushed it.
	They closed it at 10 o'clock.
	We left at 11 o'clock.
	Not once did Dino complain.
	Not a word.
	If his name is Dino, it could be Jose, but he claimed from some Italy.
	I think he was afraid of Adam.
	That's what happened.
	That's exactly what it is.
	What was it?
	He's right next to Michael.
	He's afraid of me.
	No, no.
	Kosher Nostra?
	Kosher Nostra.
	Kosher Nostra.
	That was hilarious.
	Those are my people.
	That's Adam's jokes, joke.
	But we had a good time last night.
	Yesterday we were at Shooters, and I'm going to Shooters to meet with Mike Goldman guy, and then I see Michael there with the family.
	I'm like, Michael, what are you guys doing here?
	It was an interesting story he had with Shooters, if you don't mind sharing with the audience.
	Yeah, first of all, when I went by it on boat, I didn't recognize it because they redid the whole thing like seven, eight years ago.
	But that was the first date I had with my wife.
	She was 20 years old.
	And actually, I was home.
	I had a place in Delray Beach.
	I was home sleeping.
	Somebody said, hey, that beautiful girl is there tonight.
	You know, come by.
	So I got dressed, went down there.
	Specifically to see her.
	Specifically to see her.
	Wow.
	And we spent a couple hours together.
	And the rest is history, as they say.
	Literally, the rest is history.
	History, yes.
	Yeah.
	You've got how many kids together?
	We have four.
	By the way, beautiful kids.
	Thank you.
	Great.
	One of them is apparently, he was a bodybuilder.
	My daughter.
	Your daughter.
	She's a personal trainer.
	And, you know, they're all into all the girls are into fitness.
	My wife and all the girls.
	The guys were, you know, we're athletes.
	But by the way, water skiers.
	Fun facts.
	Yes.
	Michael, people don't believe your age, just so you know.
	People want to check your ID because they don't believe your age.
	Michael, if you're comfortable saying it on camera, I'm good.
	I'm 70 years old.
	70 years old.
	Water skiing yesterday in Forlauda, Doha.
	Yeah.
	So you actually went water skiing yesterday.
	I went water skiing.
	I hadn't done it in a long time, but it was great.
	And I wanted to do it here in Florida.
	The water's so warm.
	You don't want to get out of the way.
	I want to do a quick commercial for Florida.
	How many times have you been in the water in California?
	You've been living there for 40 years almost.
	One time.
	And how many times have you been in Florida?
	One time.
	I'll never go back.
	That was like 35 years ago.
	Never go.
	It's too cold.
	Yeah.
	You know, and especially now, I gotten here in the beach.
	You don't want to get out of the water.
	The water's just fine.
	Come on, man.
	How different is Florida today versus back in the days when the mob because the mob had a lot of things they did in Florida.
	This was a hub.
	I mean, Myers.
	Lansky was doing stuff here back in the days.
	This was great to go to Cuba before, you know, things were shut down with the hotel when Lansky was running.
	How much of a change is Florida today versus what it was back in the days?
	I mean, there's still guys living down here that I know of, but it was a big spot for us.
	I mean, when we went anywhere, we'd come to Florida.
	That was it.
	And I had a big, you know, gas operation down here.
	I loved it down here.
	But different today.
	I mean, everything's different today, Patrick.
	I mean, it's not the same influence, the same presence anywhere in the country, really.
	Even in New York.
	You know, there was a time when, I'm not kidding, every single day you pick up the New York Post, the New York Daily News, there was a mob story.
	Now, I read the New York Post every morning online.
	Maybe every six months you'll see something, you know.
	Why is that?
	You know, things have changed.
	I mean, you know, the old guard is gone.
	The new guys are, you know, staying undercover.
	It's not the same as it was before in any way, shape, or form.
	Look, you got to give the credit to Giuliani and, you know, that whole force back in the mid-80s, early to mid-80s, when he really started effectively using the Racketeering Act and put everybody away and changed everything.
	Took the union control away, did so much damage to that life, which is, I guess, good for everybody else, but it was bad for the life.
	And really.
	So this is back in the days when you were doing $8 to $12 million a week.
	How much of it was here?
	How much of it was New York?
	Well, I got indicted down here.
	I think it was like $190 million that they indicted us for down there.
	We had a big operation down here.
	I was trying to move most of what we had up there down here.
	To Florida.
	Yes.
	When you say down here, what part of Florida?
	All over.
	It was Broward Dade.
	Okay, I got it.
	I just want to revisit something that you said because I don't want to gloss over this.
	You said you got to give respect to Rudy Giuliani for what he did.
	So do you respect Rudy?
	Is that what you're saying?
	Well, I didn't back then.
	You know, he told me he was going to give me 100 years when he indicted me, but I do now.
	Yeah.
	What changed?
	Obviously, just age, wisdom?
	No, listen, you know, he was good at what he did.
	He was better at what he did than we were at what we did at the time.
	So he got us, you know, there's no doubt about it.
	He used it.
	Look, my case, I don't believe I should have been involved in that case, but he didn't frame me.
	There was some semblance of something that he could have indicted me on.
	He did.
	But I was acquitted, so I beat it, and it was legitimately acquitted.
	But look, you got to give him credit.
	I mean, he was a good prosecutor.
	He knew what he was doing.
	And I think he firmly believed that what he was doing was the right thing.
	So you can't get mad at somebody like that.
	Well, how do you process that?
	I mean, this is his biggest competitor, you know.
	You deal with competitors.
	What does Peyton Manning say about Brady?
	Oh, yeah.
	What are you going to say?
	I mean, the guy is better than you.
	You know how hard it is for Manning to be able to swallow and say, hey, this guy, yesterday a quote came out about what Brady said back in 2012.
	And a guy asked the question and says, man, how's it going to feel when you pass up Montana?
	He says, I'm not going after Montana.
	I'm going after Jordan.
	So think about meaning.
	I don't care about winning five.
	I care about winning seven because seven is one more than Michael than it's a dude.
	And he did it.
	And he did it.
	And by the way, it's tougher to win seven rings in the NFL than it is to win six in the NBA because in the NBA, you get seven games.
	So meaning you can have a bad day and lose to Eli Manning twice.
	It ain't going to happen in the NBA.
	You're not going to have four great games.
	You know what I'm saying?
	But anyways, going back to it.
	You had a good quote about Manning and Brady in the Hall of Fame induction.
	Oh, yeah, yeah.
	Well, that was Manning's pretty funny, obviously.
	Everybody knows Manning.
	And they had the matchups where they were in the AFC Championship five years in a row.
	And one of the pregames, you know, Manning gave the response.
	They were like, what's it like when you go up against Brady?
	He's like, well, you know, I don't really go up against Tom Brady.
	I go up against defense, and that's, you know, so I don't think of it as me competing against Tom Brady.
	I got to beat the defense.
	You don't play safety.
	And they asked Brady the same thing.
	He's like, yeah, I want to kick Manning's ass.
	Absolutely.
	I see every pass he makes and I need to make, if he goes 17 for 19, I'm going 18 for 19.
	That's the difference in mentality.
	That was deflection on Manning's business.
	Oh, for sure.
	Because, by the way, Manning is super competitive, even from Tennessee when he came out.
	The guys.
	People forget how good I think Peyton Manning was.
	I think it was 2004.
	He threw 490 passes and had 49 touchdowns.
	One out of every 10 passes he threw went for a touchdown.
	The dude was on real.
	He was great, no doubt.
	Now, is he connected to the mob?
	Is that what we're going with?
	Manning?
	That's kind of a good thing.
	Because anyone that's not connected to the mob is, hey, one way, Eli Manning beats old Tommy touchdowns twice.
	Are you a Giants guy?
	Are you a Yankees guy?
	I was a Jets guy most of my life.
	I went to Sarah Strackle.
	Yeah, nobody's perfect, huh?
	Well, you know what?
	I'm a loyal guy, but I left the team because of management.
	They just never put a good team on the field for how many years?
	So you're a Jets guy?
	Yeah.
	What, Knicks?
	Now, let me tell you.
	You're an island guy.
	Are you a Ranger guy or an Islander?
	I don't like hockey.
	I'm not a big hockey guy.
	He doesn't like the cold.
	But I'll tell you what happened.
	You know, with my work with the NFL, I visited the Patriots and I spent time with them, addressed the team, and I became a huge Patriot fan because I love Belichick.
	I met Brady.
	Matt Patricia, who is a defensive coordinator, became a good friend.
	And that would get me killed in New York faster than quitting the mob.
	Wow.
	You cannot be a Patriot fan in New York.
	That's for sure.
	How long ago was that visit?
	About three years ago.
	Oh, so three or four years ago.
	Eric Current.
	Item Brady, everything.
	It broke my heart when the tuna went to the Patriots.
	The tuna with the Patriots just never sat.
	Ourselves?
	Yeah, the big tuna, huh?
	Yeah.
	And I got to tell you, Brady, he sat in the front row and he asked some very intelligent questions.
	I just got a lot of respect for him, not only on the field.
	And were you a Yankees guy, Mets guy?
	Diehard Yankee fan.
	Okay.
	Die hard.
	What's the scene in?
	Speaking of, congratulations to Derek Sanderson Jeter.
	Number two, Derek Jeta going to the Hall of Fame.
	You know who showed up to his ceremony?
	All his girlfriends?
	Michael Jordan.
	Oh, yeah.
	Jordan?
	Jordan and Patrick Ewing showed up.
	Can you imagine, like, Jordan shows up?
	You're not even in his game.
	He shows up to your ceremony.
	He's recently divorced, and like Adam said, where Jeter goes, you know, party treats follow.
	What was the scene in Bronx Tale where De Niro says?
	Mickey Mantle doesn't pay your bills.
	Mickey Mantle.
	Exactly.
	Mickey Mantle.
	He throws the card.
	That wasn't De Niro.
	That was Chaz Pollen.
	That was Chaz Polly.
	Oh, shaze Charles.
	What are you crying?
	Bill Mazaraski.
	Made Mickey Mantle cry.
	Mickey Mantle cry?
	Yeah, that card today.
	His father can't pay the bills.
	That's Mickey Manny.
	Car today graded PSA 10 is worth $20 million.
	$20 million.
	Three of them left in the world.
	Bro, when you tell me these stories, it's amazing.
	I used to put baseball cards on the spokes of my bicycle.
	Not Mickey Mano, though.
	No, man.
	Nobody puts Mickey Mano in the corner.
	I had a Ronaldo.
	Mickey Man in Ron Gantz card.
	He was like my idol.
	I love Mantle.
	He was my idol.
	He made me a Yankee fan.
	Morton DiMaggio as an Italian, really?
	Yeah, well, I was younger with DiMaggio.
	Mano was my, you know, was my guy.
	Why, though?
	What kind of a player was he?
	Like, how did he win the fans over?
	He just, you know, everything about him.
	I mean, he was a 5-2 player.
	He could do everything right.
	If that guy was healthy, if he didn't have the knee problem and all, you know, the ailments that he had, if you saw his routine in getting ready for a game, you wouldn't believe it.
	But I guess what happened?
	I was at Yankee Stadium one time, the old stadium, and Mantle hit two home runs.
	They were playing Detroit.
	He had two home runs, and he made two catches in center field that I can, if I close my eyes, I can see it.
	Both of them were over the head, like this, right up against the wall.
	Just kept running straight for the wall and made that catch.
	I don't know how he did it.
	He never looked back.
	Never looked back.
	You were at that game?
	I was at the game.
	Wow.
	So you watch Mantle play.
	Oh, yeah, yeah.
	My dad took me many times.
	Now, you were a Brooklyn guy and you liked the Yankees.
	You weren't a Dodger guy?
	No, no, no.
	You know why?
	Because when they left Brooklyn, all I ever heard was those effing Dodgers.
	You don't leave Brooklyn.
	Everybody turned on him.
	My grandmother prayed for Gil Hodges every day for us.
	Yeah, well, he was a good guy.
	He was a good manager for the Mets.
	Michael, who's your top five all-time baseball?
	I mean, I know this is off-topic, but you said Mantle.
	So what do you think of Mays?
	Oh, Mays Mays was amazing.
	Did you watch Mays?
	I've seen Mage play, yeah.
	You've seen Mace play.
	Yes.
	Well, we talked about this.
	I know we did.
	I'm curious to know what he's going to say.
	One of the things about Mays that a lot of people don't know.
	So some of the old timers that I used to talk about.
	450.
	600 660 home runs.
	They're like, it doesn't even do him justice.
	He played in the pole grounds.
	It was 450 to dead center.
	And then he went out to San Francisco where he had to deal with Gale Force winds blowing him from left field or something.
	So he was amazing.
	So you got Mantle, you got Mays, you got Jeter?
	I love Jeter.
	I mean, how can you?
	Jeter was the player of the moment.
	Whenever you needed something, he was there.
	This is November.
	Who rounds out your top five?
	Oh, gosh, it's hard.
	I mean, for me, they were all Yankees because I'm a diehard Yankee fan.
	But I can recite the whole, you know, Yankee team, you know, scouring.
	I don't want to go into it because it makes me sad, but I miss them.
	But because I'm so disappointed in that.
	And now, God, the way they're playing.
	Yeah, George is probably rolling over in his grave.
	They've got no hard.
	Did you ever meet Steinbrenner?
	I met Steinbrenner twice with that.
	Yeah, I love the guy.
	Loved him.
	I mean, he didn't take any nonsense.
	Was he off-camera like how he is on ground?
	Great guy off-camera.
	Okay.
	Is he like a Trump personality?
	Yes, big-hearted guy.
	You described him right.
	Just like Trump.
	Big-hearted guy, but nothing intimidated him.
	He didn't care how great a player you were.
	He wanted to get the most out of them, and he motivated them in any way that he thought.
	And it was very effective.
	Who's the skipper he fired two or three times on higher?
	Billy Mark?
	Billy Maher.
	Billy Martin.
	It's great when they went on.
	And then Yogi tried to do the same thing with Yogi, and Yogi said he'd never go back.
	Now, Yogi Berra, 5'8, 10 World Series, one of the greatest catchers of all time.
	I mean, how could you not lie?
	One of the greatest wordsmiths of all time.
	Comedian.
	Nobody goes there anymore.
	It's too busy.
	Wait.
	10 World Series championships?
	Yes.
	10 World Ships.
	Yoli's got 10.
	Yogi Berra.
	Joki.
	You talk about his humility, right?
	Humility to move to the outfield because Elston Howard was coming up as the catcher.
	Holy 5'8.
	That's a time when the Yankees were absolutely beloved.
	They were amazing.
	Like the whole country loved them.
	Now, very polarized.
	Nobody loves the Yankees.
	You loved him.
	I hated him.
	I was one of the two, you know?
	You loved him.
	But dude, the late 90s were a halcyon time, also, man.
	Like the Yankees, Red Sox rivalry was just must-watch TV.
	I cannot tell you the last time I had my calendar marked to watch a baseball game.
	And I love baseball, but I can't tell you the last time I watched it.
	When was the last time?
	What team got you interested?
	The Braves?
	Is it the player?
	Was it Maguire Sosa?
	Maguire Sosa.
	98.
	No, you know, look, I love the game.
	When I was a kid, the Mets were like unreal.
	Like the late 80s Mets were like, they were rock stars.
	And then 86 million.
	Dude, you got to remember Ken Griffey Jr., the crossover appeal of Ken Griffey Jr.
	I mean, imagine kids today wanting to go buy sneakers because of a baseball player.
	Like nobody even knows who Mike Trout is.
	You had to have the Griffies.
	You had to have the sneakers.
	The kid.
	You had to have the swing man.
	Like, you know, like, it's hard enough if these guys are some cleats now.
	I mean, you know, you had to have Ken Griffey Jr. baseball on Super Nintendo.
	That game was unreal.
	You were a big Juan Gonzalez guy.
	Die Hard.
	Die Hard Texas Rangers fan.
	I was a diehard tech.
	He was 6'2.5, 218.
	I had similar physique, similar swing, and I just loved his game.
	I played with Juan Gon in spring training, and I've never seen anybody hit in batting presence.
	I've never seen anybody.
	Did he make you a Rangers fan?
	Oh, diehard.
	That's your favorite.
	Yeah, from 91, 92.
	Wow.
	Oh, yeah.
	When he came in, because Sosa was a rookie win, 1988, 89.
	He was a rookie in 1990.
	He came, I don't know what it was, second or third year.
	He had 28 home runs.
	I think he even, I think Sosa got drafted by the White Sox, and then he got traded to the Cubs.
	And Gonzalez came in, and I started following Julio Franco.
	Julio Franco was also Kevin Brown.
	Yeah.
	I have a very controversial statement here on this.
	Here we go.
	Steroids were great.
	They were great for baseball.
	They really were.
	I don't know who was hurt by it.
	I don't know who.
	These guys were throwing 100 miles an hour and they were hitting the ball 7,000 feet.
	It was an exciting game.
	They were running fast.
	It was hardball.
	They used to say hardball is back.
	One of the greatest commercials ever made is Tom Glavin and Greg Maddox looking at Michelle Pfeiffer, walks past them to get Mark McGuire's autograph.
	And they go, chicks dig the long ball.
	And then Steph just pumping it.
	They're ball combined.
	Because I remember chicks dig the long ball.
	It was just a great time for sports.
	Sosa Maguire hugging it out, but they got those little dinosaur arms because they're so big trying to hug each other.
	It was a great spectacle.
	He was emotional when McGuire hit the home run.
	He picked up his son.
	He comes down.
	The place is going crazy.
	The home run almost didn't go, by the way.
	Yeah.
	The seven yet.
	It was just a line drive to the left.
	None of those guys make it into the Hall of Fame because Bud Selig's in there cashing all that paper from all those years.
	But he ruined the game with the strike.
	He ruined the game.
	And then he gets to go into the Hall of Fame because these guys brought it all the way back.
	Man, I think what you're saying is, let's make steroids great again.
	Is that what you're trying to say?
	Any kids that are watching this don't do it.
	But what I'm saying is that the guys that did do it, it was a pretty fun product to watch.
	There's nobody that can tell me that they watched late 90s, early 2000s baseball and said, oh, the game's better than that.
	You know the whole thing when they say, like, hey, if I did steroids, I'd also win the Stro Olympia.
	I'd also win, you know, be a bodybuilder.
	Oh, I fight the steroids.
	You can do all the steroids in the world.
	There's no way you can hit a 95-mile fastball.
	Gary Bond.
	I was going to say, where's the controversy?
	Nobody has yet proven that the steroids made you hit more home runs.
	I mean, really, you can't say that for a fact.
	And I forgot the steroids helped you get stronger and helped you, you know, but and the pitchers pitched fast.
	That was the other thing.
	So there was like years, like the pitchers weren't doing that.
	I'll push back a little bit on this.
	When Gary Sheffield hit a home run on a check swing, that's when you know something.
	Gary just goes back and you're like, wait, what the hell just was a few years ago?
	Do you remember that or no?
	Do you remember?
	I got one even worse.
	Glenn Allen Hill breaking his bat and then slamming the bat down in Chicago and the ball carries, carries, carries.
	Glenn Allen Hill was a not, and that's not to say either of these guys were doing anything.
	Anyway, just like Mink, why is every pitcher now pitching 99, 100 miles an hour?
	Yeah.
	Who knows?
	Not steroids.
	I think it's more, you can get away more with HRT today, growth hormone, than you can with steroids.
	It's easier to get away with growth hormone today.
	Yes, there's some people, conspiracies out there about LeBron, what he's on, how he takes care of his body.
	It's not Corinthian doing that.
	It's not the S is doing that.
	There's something that's going on there that maybe we don't know about.
	But it is what it is.
	I mean, listen, I don't mind LeBron staying healthy to play 20-plus years.
	I think it's better for sports.
	I'd much rather get him 20 years than 12 years.
	So if you're figuring out a way to keep the youth juice going where you can, like you, your seven is going.
	By the way, yesterday we're having dinner.
	I'm sitting there.
	I order, what did I order?
	Everything.
	Okay.
	No, no.
	I ordered bison.
	You ordered the parmesan.
	And also, real quick, one of the most baller things I've ever seen in my life.
	This is the first time in my life I've ever sat down at a table and the food was waiting for us.
	That's a Carolina movie.
	Shut up the Carolina.
	Yeah, the appetizer was waiting.
	And then Michael, his food shows up.
	And his wife says, watch him finish that and finish half my plate.
	Michael's sitting, no joke, quietly.
	He's talking to everybody.
	This massive bone, I don't know what it was, right?
	Triceratops.
	He finishes that, then it finishes.
	And then Sweets comes.
	Yeah, I guess I'll try a little bit of this.
	And then that's gone.
	And then the next thing, you know, dessert.
	Anyways, he said something to me in the middle of dinner.
	He goes, Yeah, I probably, I eat a lot.
	I could probably eat more than Gerard.
	That's going toe-to-toe at him with it.
	And his wife said, Michael Fruit wants to go toe-to-toe with you.
	Gerard finished the dessert, took it home.
	On the way home, he finished it, and then he ran two miles this morning on the beach.
	Yeah, man.
	The bus boy's cleaning up the plates.
	Somebody's talking too, Melchat goes, keep eating your sweets.
	Can we get this guy a muffin or something?
	So, so we got something we're going to reveal today for the first time.
	We're going to show some footage today from Rudy Giuliano from Mafia States of America on what was said about Mario Cuomo.
	And you reached out to the Cuomo camp to see if Andrew Cuomo had anything to say about that day multiple times.
	They did not want to respond.
	It turns out he had some other things to deal with.
	Yeah, extracurricular activities.
	But, you know, we won't go there.
	So, Michael, first of all, why don't we go and talk about the sit-down with you and Sammy?
	Okay.
	We talked about this for a while.
	You know, it was going to happen.
	It wasn't going to happen.
	Mike, Sammy didn't want to do it.
	You didn't want to do it.
	And then you guys spoke and it's like, let's see if we can do it.
	And then we had a few calls together.
	What got you to a point to finally want to do this?
	I'm sure millions of people have been asking about when is this going to happen, but what made you say, you know what, let's do this sit-down?
	You know, first of all, a lot of people wanted it, it seemed.
	You know, I would get it.
	For some reason, it was even before the thought was even, you know, moving around to sit with him.
	People were saying, you know, what's your feeling about Sammy?
	Do you ever going to sit down with him?
	Was he the real deal?
	And what do you think about the murder?
	I mean, I got so many Sammy questions.
	So, you know, I was just, I was sitting with my wife and I said, you know, maybe I'll talk to Sammy and we'll see if we can put this together.
	And that's really how it happened.
	And then when we did it, you guys, you brought your camp.
	He brought his camp.
	You guys were in two different properties.
	We had you on this side.
	We had Sammy on this side.
	And the whole thing starts.
	How'd you think it went?
	I mean, first of all, we have how many hours of footage?
	We have including the drone footage.
	We have 26 hours.
	26 hours of footage, of which, let's be honest, 70% is Sammy.
	I would say 24 hours with Sammy talking.
	But how did you think it went?
	You know, I mean, look, I'm glad it happened.
	You know, there's so much nonsense going on in the internet right now.
	I mean, guys are just coming out of the woodwork, you know.
	A lot of them I never even heard of before.
	But look, there was a Sammy and I were really a part of that life on the level that we were on.
	He was the underboss.
	I was a copo at that time.
	And even though things, you know, Sammy did what he did, I did what I did, there's still a certain amount of respect there.
	It's just, you just feel it inside, you know.
	Even though we both are out of the life, he disagrees on that for some reason.
	He still thinks he's cousin Ostra.
	I said, you want to walk down the streets of Brooklyn with me?
	Let's see how Cousin Ostra you are.
	Why, what would happen if he walked down the streets of Brooklyn?
	Well, I'll leave that up to you to leave.
	Take that question from the chain.
	Some guy from Iowa named Todd with neck tattoos who tried to serve him a milk latte.
	Okay.
	But I can't explain it.
	You know, there's still speaking to him, there's a certain amount of respect that I feel, you know, and I think he felt the same for me.
	So that came out.
	You know, and these sit-downs, you know, it's amazing, Patrick.
	You can be away from the life for me now, what, 20 some odd years.
	But sometimes I'll get off a plane in New York and the feeling comes right back.
	It's like I never left.
	And when I sat down with Sammy, I almost felt the same way.
	We were at a sit-down, and there's a level of respect that you have for one another, regardless of what either one of us did.
	And I think it came out during that.
	I mean, he got a little testy.
	We both got a little testy at some point.
	And, you know, I had to remind him he's not the underboss anymore.
	You know, just calm down.
	And he said some things to me.
	And we both said some things, you know, at different times about each other that weren't, you know, very nice.
	But I think all in all, it went pretty well.
	Yeah, I mean, I showed, obviously, there's a lot of different Sections to the interview, but there was a part when I showed a clip with you and Mike Tyson where I asked Sammy, I said, Sammy, I want to show you a video with what Michael said about you on Mike Tyson, just to see what reaction would be.
	And it was a clip of you saying Sammy had, what was it, Napoleon syndrome.
	Napoleon conversation.
	Gotta say Gotti on his best day.
	Napoleon on his worst day was better.
	Gotta than Sammy on his best day.
	And how much has that changed from that comment being made on Tyson to now after having that two days, two and a half days we spent with Sammy?
	Well, you got to understand something.
	You know, prior to me sitting down with Sammy, I spent a lot of time with my dad.
	And the talk about Sammy, you got to be honest, was not good.
	You know, from especially guys like my father, who would never say a word about anybody to the copy, he'd rather die, you know, 100 deaths than say a word about anybody.
	So to guys like my father, Sammy was a bad guy.
	You know, that's why, though.
	Why?
	Because of what he did with John.
	I mean, you know, look, testified against Gotti, testified against a whole bunch of guys.
	So the word on the street with respect to that was no good with Sammy, and especially from my dad.
	And he didn't know Sammy.
	You know, he never met him, but so he didn't have a personal relationship with him in any way.
	But what he did, you know, on the street was no good.
	So Gotti, look, Gotti was not an easy guy to get along with.
	He was a narcissistic type of guy.
	I got along with him when I had to.
	I had a couple of disputes with him.
	But he was a stand-up guy at the end of the day.
	I mean, he went to jail.
	He didn't talk about anybody, and that was it.
	And on the street, that matters.
	That matters.
	So that's why I made that comment.
	You know, it strictly pertained to that.
	But look, I got to know Sammy now.
	It's a different story.
	And he had his reasons for doing that.
	I'm not going to judge it anymore.
	And, you know, he's trying to turn his life around.
	I see how he is with his family.
	He's great.
	So, you know, who am I to judge?
	You know, look, we were all on the street.
	We all did the things that we did.
	Maybe some guy did a little bit more than another guy, but we're all guilty of that.
	And, you know, I've come to that, you know, conclusion and realization.
	So I don't want to talk about anybody.
	Sammy and I are different.
	We have a different way of looking at all of this.
	And I think it came out, you know, in this.
	Oh, yeah.
	Yeah.
	Michael, prior to the sit-down that you did with Patrick and Gerard, and obviously with Sammy, how many times had you met Sammy in person?
	How many times have you met Gotti in person prior to the sit-down?
	I met Gotti several more times than Sammy, you know, back in the day.
	We met Sammy one time.
	That's it.
	That was it.
	So this was your second time meeting Sammy in your entire life.
	Sammy, was Sammy straight up feared like he would sit there?
	Was he a dialogue guy or was he a guy that would just sit there, focus on you, and watch every move and extremely paranoid, skeptical?
	What was Sammy known for back in the days?
	Not today.
	Sammy's got a sense of humor.
	He's very charming.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	Great storyteller.
	He's engaging to be around.
	There's no doubt about it.
	I mean, I enjoyed the time we spent there.
	We spent several hours together.
	I went out to Arizona to see him.
	We spent several hours together.
	You know, look, he had a reputation on the street, no doubt about it.
	And we heard things about him.
	Again, it wasn't my personal involvement with him.
	But I don't want to get into all of that now because we do get into it when we sit down.
	I think that's fair.
	So let's talk about, you brought up your dad, Sonny.
	You and I met with him multiple times.
	We went to New York and we're trying to do something with him.
	And one time we had the whole crew there.
	We were at the not hospital.
	I don't know what you would call that.
	It was the veterans hospital.
	Veterans hospital we were at and talking to him.
	And so I'm driving him in the car.
	And we're going to this Italian restaurant.
	I don't know if you remember what the name of the Italian restaurant was.
	Yeah, so we go to this Italian restaurant.
	The lady's really nice, who owns the shop.
	She's taking care of us, being good to us.
	And every time I ask your dad a question, hey, Sonny, what was it like?
	What was Lucky like?
	Fantastic guy.
	He's a great guy.
	Great family guy.
	Sonny, Lucky's got a history.
	Great guy, was always respectful.
	How about Meyer?
	They said he was a billionaire.
	What do you think?
	Was he that kind of a guy?
	He had money?
	I have no idea, but great guy.
	Phenomenal guy.
	So I said, How about Ben Siegel?
	How was Ben?
	Another great guy.
	So I said, Sammy, so all the movies are lying.
	Sonny, all the movies are lying.
	These are great people that I dealt with.
	I said, Sonny, why don't we do the interview?
	So you tell the world who you were rather than the world telling everybody who you were.
	I don't want to do that.
	Why don't you want to do that?
	So one time I went there, you weren't there, your sister was there.
	They were upset.
	You know, she was upset.
	She was like, you know, because, you know, I think I had like two or three meetings.
	Mario was there.
	Mario pulls up.
	His dad looks at Mario.
	He's like, who are you?
	Mario says, and by the way, at 101 when we first met him, presence like a man you've met.
	101?
	He died at 103, just so I know that.
	So that's why he looks so good at 70.
	So you're going to go to 100 easy.
	Adam.
	His presence, unreal at 101.
	So he goes like this to Mario.
	Who are you?
	Mario says, I'm just, I'm here with Patrick.
	He says, you a rat?
	101 years old.
	He says, Sonny Francis.
	So Mario's like, no, no, I'm not a rat.
	I'm not a rat.
	He says, you sure?
	He says, yeah.
	He says, you know, 95% of men out there are rats.
	He says, you're going to rat on this guy?
	He's telling this to Mario.
	Rat on you.
	Yeah.
	So this point, first meeting, at this point, it's getting very uncomfortable.
	Mario's getting uncomfortable.
	Mario's already changed his pants.
	And then Mario's like, no, no, Sonny, he's a great guy.
	He says, okay.
	Linda, Linda, come fix my hair.
	Come here, Linda.
	Grab the coat.
	So the nurse comes and she starts fixing it.
	So, why are you doing it that way?
	Go the other way.
	You know how I like it.
	You could tell the man's presence on how Sunny was.
	You know, I'm going to be honest with you.
	I knew, I was fortunate to meet a lot of guys at that time, you know, from Chin to Fat Tony to Castellano, Gottio.
	There was nobody like my dad.
	I mean, and I'm not, you know, I'm trying to be as objective as I possibly can.
	There was really nobody like him.
	What was your dad like when he was doing his?
	You know, back in the day, he had, and that's why he became such a major target.
	I mean, what nobody really understands, I mean, if you're around that time, you knew my dad was the John Gotti of his day before they had, you know, social media and all this kind of stuff.
	He was a John Gotti.
	He became such a target of law enforcement.
	I mean, look, he's indicted four times in the 60s.
	Media like you wouldn't believe, front page all the time.
	And he was the guy.
	And it was his presence.
	You know, he just had a presence about him back then.
	You walked into a room, you knew, you know, he was there.
	That was it.
	All the focus went on him.
	You go to the Copa Guardians.
	I mean, I was with my dad.
	I'll never forget.
	We were in the Copacabana.
	I forget who was playing.
	I think it was Jimmy Roselli.
	Yeah, it was Jimmy Roselli.
	And Joe Colombo came in at that time.
	And my father had to tell the waiters to take care of Joe Colombo because everybody was catering to my father.
	If you don't know Joe Colombo, he was the boss.
	And I saw him do that a couple of times where all the attention always went to him.
	And somebody else came in the room.
	He said, hey, take care of that guy.
	You know who he is?
	Be respectful.
	He just commanded that kind of presence.
	If you could summarize your father in three major words, is there any words that come to mind?
	You know, charismatic, powerful, you know, I mean, those two words, you know, and loving.
	I mean, as a father, he was terrific.
	Never missed a baseball game of mine.
	Wanted me to go to college.
	You know, just a good husband at that time to my mom.
	I mean, he was just in the house.
	He was great.
	He was born in what year?
	1917?
	He was born in 17.
	19.
	I was born in Naples.
	My dad was born in, my grandfather came here.
	Yeah, my grandfather came here several years earlier, but he would go back by boat every year to Naples.
	And my father was born on a boat trip.
	He was one of 19 kids, by the way.
	One of 19?
	19 kids.
	No Facebook.
	No YouTube.
	Nothing else to do.
	You're saying there was no Facebook in 1919?
	That was one of the crazy parts about the interview, frankly, man, was watching two men actually sit there, have a conversation, not look at their phone for 16 straight hours.
	You see, and that's the thing.
	After being with my dad, and he taught me a lot.
	He taught me how to navigate that life.
	I was never in awe of anybody else.
	I respected them, no doubt, but I never, you know, Gotti to me was, all right, you know, he tries to be, have that big presence.
	My father didn't have to try.
	He just was who he was.
	That was it.
	Big difference.
	Oh, yeah.
	There was nobody you were in awe of.
	Like, oh, damn, he's here.
	No.
	No.
	Let me ask you, in some of the movies and some of the shows that it's been so popularized in pop culture, is there a character that you see and you're like, I think they took that from my dad?
	I think that guy is kind of playing the Sonny Francis role in it.
	No, but I'll tell you this.
	I think the greatest performance of an actor in one of those movies was Armand DeSante in the Gotti movie in 1996.
	He was tremendous.
	To me, I could watch that movie a hundred times.
	Guy, can you just talk about Armand DeSante?
	Good luck, Spelling.
	The guy's, I mean, maybe one of the best looking guys in Hollywood.
	He was in Mambo Kings with Antonio Vanduras.
	He crushed it.
	The guy's a beast of a guy.
	And his voice.
	Judge Dread.
	He's got a voice.
	You cannot teach that voice.
	No.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, he's stud.
	How old is he now?
	He's about 70.
	He's really young.
	Let's see what he's doing.
	In that movie.
	No, put Armando Asante, not DeSante.
	He's putting Ron DeSante.
	What are you doing?
	And then put Gotti.
	Put Gotti.
	Kai's from Norway.
	I don't know what part of it.
	Go images.
	Go images.
	To see how he.
	Is that Travolta?
	Yeah, that movie.
	Travolta Gliggatti.
	It was probably one of the worst movies I've seen in my life.
	Two hours later, I felt like I wanted to refund my two hours.
	And Travolta is a great actor.
	He just didn't get Gotti.
	And he didn't get Gaza.
	No, he didn't do this by Duke by your friend.
	He was a great actor.
	Kai government.
	All the way to the right.
	Really?
	One down.
	One down.
	Yeah, that was.
	All the way to the right.
	Look at this good looking chimney.
	No, no.
	By the way, this guy is sexy Gotti Ula.
	Ula la.
	But he kills every role that he's in, but he just killed that rolling guy.
	Who else did he say?
	He played Gotti better than Gotti.
	To pick up Gerard's question, who else comes to mind other than Armen Asante?
	I thought, you know, next, I thought Pacino in Donnie Brasco, because I knew Lefty.
	He was terrific.
	I thought that was his best role.
	Really?
	Yes.
	That, and obviously, gosh, he played the Cuban drug dealer.
	Oh, Scarface?
	Scarface.
	He was great in that.
	But Donny Brasco, he was terrific.
	I think that guy Pacino is going to do something good in Hollywood.
	I think something's going to come to him.
	I think it was Johnny Depp's festival.
	Let me go back to a couple stories, you know, with your father.
	How much credit, I know you and I have spoken about this before.
	How much credibility is there behind the story of your dad with Marilyn Monroe?
	That's out there.
	A lot of people have talked about that before.
	But how much of credibility is there with the story of him and Jackie?
	He said he partied with Jackie in Florida.
	Jackie?
	Jackie Kennedy.
	Jackie Kennedy.
	Him and Jackie apparently used to hang out together.
	You know, I will tell you this.
	My dad sometimes embellished things a little bit, but he never straight out lied to me.
	So he might have made it a little bit better than it really was, maybe.
	But when he told me something, I believed it.
	You know, the whole Marilyn Monroe story.
	I mean, when he finally told me that was after my mom died.
	Because I said to him, I said, Dad, why did Bobby Kennedy come after you in such a way?
	What happened?
	You know, and he said to me, Mike, now that your mother has passed, I would never be disrespectful to her.
	I can tell you.
	And he said, he had an affair with Marilyn Monroe.
	And then this might have been a little bit of embellishment.
	He said, Marilyn Monroe was in bed with Bobby Kennedy, and she started yelling my name.
	I was sonny.
	It was the swinging 60s, baby.
	And then he said, Bobby got on the phone with Hoover and said, get Francise no matter what you got to do.
	Oh, man.
	And that's when all the trouble started.
	All he had to do was run for another year or two.
	He would have been all right.
	But I mean, I do know he was with her because I said, Dad, he said, no, Mike, straight school.
	What were your thoughts on, you know, JFK, Bobby Kennedy, even MLK?
	Because that's when you were a kid in your teens.
	What was that like?
	CIA doing some house cleaning?
	Bobby Kennedy, I had to dislike because my dad always said it was him that went after him and put him in all this trouble.
	Because remember, Hoover, you know, up until that time, never would even admit that the mafia existed.
	And the reason for that is because one of the reasons, you know, Frank Costello was involved with the Stork Club.
	Hoover used to go in there quite a bit, and they had a lot of dirt on him.
	And we do cover this in Mafia States.
	They had a lot of dirt on him.
	And he would never even admit to it until Valachi came around.
	Then he had to admit to it.
	But he never went after the mob.
	Bobby Kennedy, gloves off, he went after him.
	Well, you guys, if it's all right, if I say, you and Sammy both talked about the mob's involvement in the JFK assassination as well in this upcoming.
	And you had said that you two had never spoken, you had never talked about it before, and you corroborated each other's story.
	And it was almost the exact same story.
	I heard it all my life.
	I mean, why would people lie to me about it, you know, from the right people?
	And what I believe is the classified documents about the Kennedy killing will never be revealed because the government will never want the public to know that the mafia got to a sitting president.
	That's my belief.
	I don't think they'll ever be unclassified.
	Trump tried to, or he was going to, and then they put a stop to it.
	Well, Biden just is apparently going to declassify the 9-11 report as well.
	So you have, to Adam's point, you have Marilyn Monroe dying in very, very interesting circumstances.
	Do you have a drug overdose?
	Yes, but drug overdose apparently after a phone call to the White House.
	So basically, it's pretty well known that her and Jack Kennedy, and then Jack said, passed her off on his brother Bobby, because she called one night and Jackie answered the phone, and it was like a whole thing.
	Imagine that.
	You're the president of the United States and you still got a landline.
	There were no cell phones back then, man.
	And, you know, Marilyn Monroe's calling the White House has the White House line and Mrs. First Lady answers the phone.
	Growing up, I had a poster of Pamela Anderson on my wall.
	I was a 16-year-old kid, Pamela Anderson.
	Was Marilyn Monroe like that girl for you?
	No.
	I mean, you know, she died in the 60s.
	I was still a kid.
	Okay.
	But just to get back on it, so just real quick, do you think the Kennedys had Marilyn Monroe killed?
	You know, rumors all the time, but I never heard anything from any of my associates at the time that that was true.
	And do you think the mob had anything to do with Bobby as well as Jack?
	No, I never heard that either.
	Really?
	No.
	Only Jack.
	Really?
	So what do you think about Serhan Serhan?
	You know, it's all over the news.
	They're going to let him out.
	Yeah, that they're going to let him out.
	You know, listen, you know, from a guy that's done time, and look, I've either been in prison or visiting prison my entire life.
	This guy did a lot of time.
	If he's rehabilitated, and they believe he has, let him out.
	But those of you that don't know the murderer of Bobby Kennedy, Sir Hunster Hunwin, which was put out of jail.
	And also, for people that don't know, Bobby Kennedy was a shoe-in to be the president of the United States.
	Of course.
	Absolute shoe.
	The level of momentum he had was unbearable.
	And maybe even more qualified than his brothers.
	Oh, definitely.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, a lot of people think his brother was the real brains behind the operation, but Jack just had that charisma.
	And Bobby was, what, the attorney general at the time?
	Yeah.
	Yep.
	Well, according to the momentum, we were talking about Bobby coming down on the mafia.
	According to Rudy, when Colombo did the anti-Italian, Italian anti-defamation league, Italian American Civil Rights League.
	That was when the entire FBI apparently was like, all right, enough of this.
	We got to go get these guys.
	Well, I was one of the first ones called to go on that line.
	And that thing started just several months after my dad went to prison.
	Was that like the Black Lives Matter of its time?
	Was that like...
	I mean, we were a little bit more respectful.
	We didn't start rioting and looting and doing all of that.
	Well, you weren't commies.
	No.
	We got a call to go down to 69th Street and 3rd Avenue and picket the FBI building.
	And when I got there, I mean, I was a kid.
	I was 20 years old.
	When I got there, they handed me a sign.
	And the sign said, my father was a victim of FBI Gestapo tactics.
	He was framed and sentenced to 50 years in prison.
	That was the sign I had to carry.
	That's not leaving a lot for interpretation.
	No.
	And that line grew from, you know, I mean, 40, 50 people the first or second day to thousands, thousands within a short period of time.
	I mean, Joe Colombo rallied the troops, no doubt.
	And everybody on the line, all the made guys on the line, were very upset.
	They didn't want to be there.
	They didn't want to be there.
	You know, it got so bad, the FBI was so upset, they were throwing water balloons down from, you know, FBI was throwing water balloons down on us on the line.
	Yeah.
	That's how crazy it is.
	Well, according to Giuliani, that was like the last straw.
	That was like the, okay, you guys want to do this?
	Okay.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	And that was not a popular move within the mob circles for Joe Colombo.
	Let me ask you, Pat.
	You've interviewed how many mafia people of that life?
	I don't know.
	Anybody that I could, I have.
	Yeah.
	When did this interest come up in your life?
	Obviously a kid from Iran, you weren't watching the Godfather.
	No, but you did, though.
	Oh, did you?
	I mean, Godfather in Iran was like, everybody watched the Godfather.
	Wow, even in Iran.
	In Farsi.
	Okay, Farsi.
	So yeah, tell us about that.
	Yeah, so no, we grew up watching that.
	We grew up watching all of that.
	And then, you know, Bronx Tale, Carlito's Way, Scarface, you add all of them up.
	Any one of them.
	Goodfellas, Casino.
	There's a level of curiosity, you know, what's happening.
	Because everything in business and in the mob, it's very, very similar.
	The only difference is if you cut somebody, they don't kill you.
	They may terminate your contract.
	They may, you know, no longer do business with you.
	They may do whatever they can to put you out of business, which is a form of a lawsuit, but they're not going to come and kill you, right?
	But everything else is very similar.
	Well, you heard Pat talk at the vault, I mean, about systems, about discipline, about organizational structure.
	I mean, literally, almost nobody did it better.
	Culturally, safety, how the level of respect with women, certain code you followed, sisters, daughters.
	So that created a level of safety if you were in, right?
	There was a level of safety.
	So if you create an inner circle in your business, in your company, those who are in it, there's a level of safety.
	There's a level of additional benefits that comes with that.
	So that model is ran by a lot of different people in business.
	So many similarities.
	And then, you know, Michael and I, there was a Bill McIntosh.
	We got to give him credit because Bill kept saying, Pat, you got to interview Michael.
	I'm like, Bill, I'm not doing this.
	He says, Pat, I'm telling you, interview Michael.
	For a year and a half, Bill from Peru would follow me asking me to interview Michael.
	And I kept saying, no, finally, we agreed.
	On my way to Michael's house, I was sitting with Jordan Belfort in Manhattan Beach.
	I tell Mario, Mari, we're late to the next interview.
	We're supposed to be there like 4 or 5, 4.30 or something.
	We show up at 6.30, and they're supposed to go to a church function.
	So I'm like, these guys, so Mario's, hey, Michael, we're so sorry.
	They're on their way.
	They're on their way.
	I'm dealing with LA traffic.
	Finally, we get there.
	An interview that was never supposed to happen.
	At that time, Michael's, you know, I don't know how many subs we had at that time, 500,000, 450,000, some number like that, right?
	And Michael doesn't have a lot of views online.
	He's got 500,000 view videos, 300,000 view videos.
	He's done some stuff.
	And then we do the interview.
	We post it.
	We don't think much of it.
	Next day, Michael's like, hey, Patrick, can you tell me what's going on?
	I said, Michael, you're on the cover of WorldStar.
	He says, what are you talking about?
	So the interview goes on WorldStar, picked up by WorldStar.
	Everybody starts contacting us about this interview.
	It takes off.
	Now it's got, I don't know, 12 plus million, about to cross 13 million views.
	And so that led to the next interview.
	And I don't know who, I think we did another part to you and I.
	Yeah.
	We got well over 20 some odd million.
	Oh, yeah, yeah.
	I mean, listen, I mean, now Michael's got stuff that he did with BuzzFeed.
	He's all over the place.
	Michael has done wired, but you got everything.
	Now you got your channel that's about to cross a million subs.
	You guys are crushing it with your crew that you guys got there.
	Then Sammy, we did the interview with Sammy.
	And Sammy was extremely difficult to get that done.
	He just didn't want to get on camera.
	Sammy didn't want to get on camera.
	He says, you think I'm going to sit with you?
	I sat with Diane Sawyer in 1994.
	I'm going to do one of these YouTube things.
	But now he's doing YouTube left and right.
	You can't get him off.
	But talk about that.
	You go from being 2020 to YouTube.
	To a YouTuber.
	How does that happen, Michael?
	I don't know.
	Honestly, it's the crazy.
	You know, sometimes I'm in bed laying down at night and I'm saying, what am I doing with this YouTube?
	It's a powerful tool, man.
	You know, things got real when you said, if you like that, there's another clip over here.
	And if you like the channel, please subscribe and smash that thumbs up.
	What are we talking about?
	Not only that, almost every other day I go on YouTube and there's somebody else.
	You know what I mean?
	It's like, you know, it's a whole genre.
	People go crazy.
	We're saturating.
	And Michael, it's really only two people that are, you know, so of course there is a lot.
	But, you know, when it comes down to this genre, it's two people.
	I know John is thinking about doing something.
	The rumor on the street is John is thinking about doing something.
	So if he is doing something.
	Yeah, I know he is doing.
	That's what Sec Mafia is doing.
	But I don't know what angle he's going to take.
	I don't know how he's got some people on his team that are quality people.
	We've had a couple conversations with them in the past, not today.
	When we did the Sammy interview, we had some exchange there.
	But it's not going to be a camp that's going to have a lot of people there.
	Sammy's interviews now got 12 plus million views.
	So both of them, 12 plus.
	So you got Sammy 12 plus million views.
	Michael 12 plus million views.
	He's about to cross 13.
	Now we have Mafia States of America.
	So it's not like individuals.
	So Sammy calls Michael out.
	Then Michael calls Sammy out.
	And it went back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, non-stop.
	Like Michael would say something.
	And Sam's like, but what are you saying there?
	What's your point with that?
	And then Michael, Sammy would say something, but Sammy, I disagree with you.
	And then so this, like Chaz Palminteri says, Patrick, I don't know if you understand this.
	This has never happened in a history of a mob.
	This has never happened.
	And I got a phone call I got.
	I'll tell you about afterwards a very interesting phone call that you and I will talk about right after.
	I was going to bring it up to you yesterday.
	There were too many people around, but I'll talk to you about it afterwards, what happened.
	Very strange people have contacted me about this interview because everybody wants to know.
	And then the trailer.
	So now people are asking, when is this coming out?
	You know, we don't have a date yet.
	You know, we're trying to figure out when we're going to launch it.
	People want it to come out tomorrow.
	That would drive me crazy.
	I'm sorry, I don't know.
	Speak to Patrick.
	It's bigger than the mafia genre, though.
	I mean, this is a history.
	This is an America that doesn't exist.
	I think they're going to watch this 100 years.
	They have to.
	I mean, this is a time capsule.
	What I got out of this and from the research that we're doing from the project, man, is that this is the story of immigrants making their way in America.
	You could be the mafia is identified with Italian Americans, but as we got into it, you talked about Bugsy Siegel.
	You talked about Jewish, the Jewish immigrants in the beginning in New York were the ones that taught the other immigrants.
	We talked about this.
	Then there was the Irish Westies and then the Italians, but nobody took it to the level the Italians did.
	I mean, the Russians and the Chinese, maybe.
	Well, no, I'm going to tell you this.
	You know, when you talk about mafia causing oyster in this country, you got to understand, we survived and prospered for almost 100 years under some difficult conditions.
	I mean, we always had law enforcement after us, but why?
	Because we had structure, we had discipline, we had authority, and we had respect among one another.
	And there were some pretty intelligent guys there.
	You know, I always say this: you know, you know who made the mafia in this country, who gave us the biggest advantage?
	Prohibition.
	The government.
	Yeah.
	Prohibition.
	Because of prohibition.
	Because that's when the money came in.
	That's when we started getting the money.
	And you don't do anything without money.
	And you were advocates for the people at that point.
	The people didn't want prohibition.
	You were advocating for the public.
	Absolutely.
	Yeah.
	Are there any similarities to today?
	Prohibition was in the 20s, right?
	So now it's 100 years later.
	Are there any comparisons today to what the government is doing to manifest a certain marketplace?
	Like it's Bitcoin, the new prohibition.
	Like, what's that correlation?
	Because I have a Russian friend who says when the government, because we're talking about like government overreach and tyranny and online and everything like that, he was like, it's no problem for Russians.
	We just go black market.
	They can do whatever they want.
	We'll go on.
	Russians are very smart.
	But, you know, you don't want to get me started.
	I'm writing a book.
	I want you to get mafia democracy because I am telling you that our government today is acting very Machiavellian, just like the ideology that we followed on the street.
	And the other thing I wanted to say: remember, all these other groups, I mean, you got to give them credit.
	But, you know, you take the cartels in Mexico, South America, they're built around drugs.
	You take drugs away, that's it.
	They got nothing.
	But we infiltrated every sector of society from the guy on the street with the numbers business right up to the White House and everything in between.
	And you know this, Patrick.
	You control the unions in this country, you control the country.
	Yeah, that's literally what the Democrats are doing.
	Not today, because they took a lot of the union power away from us.
	But look, you control the Teamsters.
	You got two and a half million truck drivers.
	You call a strike, the country stops.
	Which?
	You call a strike at the docks?
	Nothing comes in and out of it.
	To his point, what did they just do in Australia to compete against these vaccine mandates?
	The truckers shut down the roads.
	They stopped on the bridges.
	All at the same time, they shut the country down.
	And within 24 hours, South Wales in Australia went from mandatory vaccinations to non-mandatory to what do they consider?
	And it's legit.
	You call a strike, it's legit.
	They can't do anything to stop you until you negotiate and they reach a point of a conclusion.
	But you have that kind of power, you know, and politicians, you got these huge pension funds.
	You know, politicians are drawn to money.
	You know that, Patrick.
	They're drawn to money.
	When you control that type of, when you have that type of control, you've got a lot of authority.
	has more power in America than the NEA right now.
	The Education Association of the country.
	It's funny.
	Yesterday I spoke to Captain Dennis Tager, who is the spokesperson for the largest union for pilots in America, 15,000 pilots.
	It's called APA Allied Pilots Association, right?
	And he was talking about the difference between union today versus before.
	You know, how Jimmy Hoffa, union before versus today.
	How different is today's union than before?
	Has it changed much, or is it still similar kind of influence and power?
	Good question.
	It's changed a lot because the mob doesn't have the control over it as it did before.
	Okay.
	You know, and the numbers are down in the unions.
	Numbers are down, I think.
	You know, back, you know, in my day, unions were powerful, man.
	Look, I had.
	When you say numbers are down, you mean percentage of Americans who are part of unions?
	One out of, as late as the 1960s, one out of every three Americans was in a union.
	And now I got to suspect it's less than 10% of the country.
	No, it's no, because it's 40% because almost 90% of all government employees are unions.
	There's almost no private sector unions.
	They're all public sector now.
	Patrick, I had control through a guy by the name of Danny Cunningham.
	We had the security union, right?
	We had security at nine nuclear power plants in the country.
	Now, in those nuclear power plants, I don't know if you know, at that time, when a nuclear plant closed down, you had to have security there for 100 years.
	What?
	100 years.
	Why?
	And it was closed.
	Why?
	That's what the government said.
	You've got to have security there for 100 years.
	Whoa.
	Danny Cunningham.
	It's a good contract to get.
	Question for you.
	Why were most of you in the mob Democrats when you were in the life, but Republican or Independent, center-right, whatever you want to call it, once you guys left the life?
	That's kind of interesting to me.
	I keep talking to guys where, you know, even Leonetti, you know, even Sammy, some of these guys.
	Well, Leonetti is still under a Democrat, but why were some of these guys Democrats when you were in the life?
	What happened?
	What changed?
	Well, I think with Trump, because Trump is a New Yorker and he's got that way about him, we're attracted to him.
	For me, it's about his policies, but I won't get into that.
	But on the street, we hated the Republicans because they were the law and order party.
	Got it.
	The Democrats were easier to corrupt.
	Every politician that we knew that we corrupted, they were all Democrats.
	Every single one of them.
	Unpacked that.
	What do you mean by that?
	You know, guys that we had on the payroll, guys that would do us favors, guys that got me licenses for my gas business, they were all Democrats.
	So if you went up to a Republican and say, listen, I need a gas license, what would they say to you?
	Or did you not even approach it?
	We didn't do it.
	We didn't approach you.
	Because you knew that.
	There were plenty of Democrats around to do it.
	You had in the 80s?
	When is this?
	Yeah, 80s.
	70s, 80s, yeah, all the way through.
	But dude, the start of the Democratic Party with Tammany Hall and with Boss Tweed, I mean, the big tent idea is, you know, vote early, vote often, Chicago politics.
	I mean, it's pretty well documented, man.
	Your folks are not exactly the most noble creatures walking the face of the earth.
	It's like my dad hated Ronald Reagan.
	Don't let him bully you, bro.
	Ronald Reagan's a rat.
	He's a rat.
	He doesn't like Italians.
	He goes after all the mob guys.
	Well, dad, that's his job.
	You're supposed to come after him.
	Oh, your dad said that to you about Reagan.
	So your dad was a Democrat.
	Democrat, all the way.
	Interesting.
	And like I said, the guys that we were closest to, they were all Democrats.
	So Democrats were more friendlier with the mob, and they were okay with looking away and letting you do your thing.
	So Hoover, Kennedy, these guys were like, listen, you guys, as long as you do your thing and you do us favors, we're going to leave you guys alone.
	Joe Kennedy was a bootlegger.
	You know that.
	He was involved in Prohibition.
	He was close with Costello and a couple of guys that knew him well.
	That's how this whole deal came together with the Kennedys.
	You know, I can meet Esposito.
	I mean, it's public knowledge now.
	He was very close to a good friend of mine, Fritzie Givenlli, and another guy I don't want to mention him.
	He's still around.
	And, you know, Fritzie was with Chin Giganti.
	Meade did us a lot of favors.
	Yeah.
	Mario Biagi, the same thing.
	These guys passed on now.
	Cuomo.
	How much is, sorry, how much of this is because for a long time, the unions did represent the working man.
	And you guys were the working man.
	And the Democratic Party wanted to represent the working man.
	And this was part of the fabric of everyday life.
	So, you know, it's one thing that they were corruptible, but I'm sure, you know, just to play devil's advocate and to unbreak Adam's heart, it's like, I'm sure in some way there was a wink and a nod.
	Like, how much more money do these rich Republicans need?
	How much more money do these robber baron Nixon Republicans need, man?
	So, I mean, it's like, what am I going to come down on the guy that's what's he doing?
	Running numbers?
	Come on.
	You know, so I mean, how much of it was like that?
	And don't get me wrong.
	It wasn't that we were selective.
	We had to go with a Democrat.
	We didn't care if you were Democratic, Republican, Independent, or whatever.
	It just so happens that the guys that were easiest to get to were Democrats.
	You're saying if you don't care about the red or the blue, you care about the green.
	Exactly.
	Exactly.
	We didn't care who it was.
	I'm interested in the structure you talked about before because you're talking about the way that you guys were able to build out, the way that you were able to build out, infiltrate all parts of life.
	You guys had this corporate structure.
	The Commission was one of the first true C-suite boards in America.
	But you guys don't have, I'm assuming you don't have user manuals and there's no orientation.
	You're not going away on a weekend trip to the mainstream.
	Eventually it was a user manual.
	They eventually was a user manual and that's what they used to come after them.
	A banana book?
	The banana book was the user manual.
	So he gave that up to everybody.
	So for years before that, how was the structure passed on?
	It was just word of mouth or I can't imagine there was a mafia oriented, congratulations on being a maid man.
	Come this way and we'll teach you day one on what's code red in the Marines.
	I only know because of one of my favorite movies of all time.
	And I'm assuming it's a sick movie, right?
	But code red was a real thing for a long time.
	Was it really?
	Of course it was.
	Wow.
	But it's not something that you talk about, right?
	There's a lot of things.
	You know, I don't know who I was talking to, Michael, that said, you know, the best guy he dealt with, I don't know if it was Sugarman, I don't know who it was.
	One of these guys I spoke to, he said the best gangsters were the ones like Meyer Lansky never wrote anything down on paper.
	He was even Harvey Keitel when they wrote the movie, he talks about it in there.
	He says, never write anything down on paper.
	Everything was here.
	Exactly.
	The guys that did it right, they tracked, like if they knew this guy owed him 10 grand or 20 grand, it wasn't written anywhere like an Excel spreadsheet.
	Hey, you know, Mr. Director of a, it was like, hey, you know what you did last month?
	Where's that $10,000?
	What do you mean $10,000?
	Well, you know, I know what you did.
	So it was a lot of memorization, the guys that did it right.
	So you almost had to have a certain skill.
	That's not a duplicatable.
	I want to tell you this.
	And this is the God's honest truth.
	I never wrote anything down.
	Before I went to prison, I would never forget a phone number.
	I would never forget who owed me money.
	I never forget a name.
	Never.
	At that level, you were making that much money and never forget anything.
	When I went to prison, and this is the truth, so many guys would hit me up with deals and stories and this that I would, yeah, yeah, yeah.
	I would let it go in one ear, one out the other.
	When I come out of prison, I couldn't remember a name, a phone number, or anything else.
	And it stuck.
	You were locked in.
	You were in the zone.
	Locked in.
	But back in the day.
	Back in the day.
	Well, you know what?
	My father told me.
	I was discatable, by the way.
	My father used to tell me the telephone is a cop.
	That's how you look at the phone.
	When we were in my house in Roslyn, Long Island, my dad wanted to talk to me when he was on parole.
	He said, come on, let's go.
	We did it, take a walk, and he would talk to me like this, like a pitcher on the mound, talk to me like that.
	Or we would go into the bathroom.
	He would turn on the faucets.
	We would lean our heads into the faucet and he'd be standing there flushing the toilet to make sure that nobody can hear him.
	Wow.
	He ingrained that in me.
	I never got caught on a wiretap.
	I never had any of that stuff that I had to worry about because I looked, I was, I don't want to use the word paranoid, was extremely careful.
	Has any of that stuck around till today or no?
	Like, you know how sometimes, you know, like I was born in Iran, so if I hear a certain alarm, like it takes me straight back to Iran.
	If I hear a certain noise, is it still in there?
	Same way.
	And truthfully, Patrick, I hate talking on the phone.
	I still don't like it.
	I just, I'm not comfortable.
	If you live that life, there's some of that stuff.
	It's just on your cell phone.
	I don't like to talk on the phone.
	You see my very few phone calls.
	His dad is saying the phone's a cop, and everybody is like, hi, cop.
	What is the name of the dude?
	But you made a comment about Mario Cuomo.
	Kai, do you have that video about Mario Cuomo, what you guys talked about, as well as what Giuliani said about Mario Cuo?
	If you have that, I wouldn't mind because when we were sitting down, go ahead.
	No, it's a great baseball player as well, Mario Cuomo, for people that don't know.
	He was a big Yankee prospect that got one of the biggest signing bonuses of all time at one point.
	By the way, he was a guy that was loved and admired by a lot of people, a lot of people from both sides, based on what you read about the guy.
	Respected.
	So I asked you guys about Mario Cuomo.
	Comments came up.
	It was not necessarily intentional, just kind of came up.
	And you guys both said, maybe if you want to share it, you guys both talked about how Mario's involvement.
	It was, you know, in the mob.
	He was friendly with guys on the street, no doubt.
	So here's what Rudy said about Mario Cuomo.
	Kai, if you want to play it, it's by the way, yeah, and with Rudy, we sat down for three and a half hours at his place.
	If he could have, he would have kept you there all day.
	Oh, and if we release what Giuliani said, I don't, you know, like some of the stuff that Julian, maybe that may be episode 8, 9, 10 that people have to watch it.
	But some of the stuff that he says, it's going to be, it's not going to be good for some folks out there.
	But go ahead.
	Play what Giuliani said about that.
	Many names were brought up.
	So I asked him, I said, who was easier to bribe?
	You know, when you were a mobster, was it the Republicans, the Democrats?
	Who was it?
	They said, not even close.
	It was always easier to bribe and buy, you know, Democrats.
	I said, give me names.
	Anybody that maybe you work with, they can talk about.
	And we started kind of going through a list of names.
	They spoke very favorably about Mario Cuomo, Governor Mario Cuomo.
	Yeah, I would too.
	Yeah, and they said very good things, but they also said we had him in our pockets.
	So you said that.
	They had him in their pocket, somewhat because of his own limitations in his thinking, and somewhat because of his wife.
	So his wife's family, and I hate to say this because she's a lovely woman.
	I think Matilda is just a grand lady.
	But this is part of the Italian experience, had mafia connections.
	And the governor was always afraid that if he ran, they would be exploited.
	And I opposed Mario in the sense of my political philosophy was completely different than his, certainly at that point in my life.
	Even though I endorsed him for governor, well, I'll explain why later.
	I needed the money for the city.
	I know he thought you'd rather be interested.
	All you need to know.
	I don't think, I know, and really can't quite describe in detail to you.
	It wouldn't be right the details of it.
	And it's not nearly as serious as he thought it was.
	I mean, it's the kind of thing you could easily explain as had nothing to do with Matilda, had nothing to do with Mario.
	And it's the kind of thing that happened back in those days when you had to conduct a business and if you didn't play ball with them, you were going to, they were victims.
	They weren't.
	They easily could have been interpreted that way.
	That's the way I interpreted it.
	But he saw shadows about it.
	You know how sometimes people are more embarrassed about something than they should be.
	I always thought that was the case with Mario.
	Largely because he was very ethical and a very good man.
	Mario was.
	Yeah, very, very good man.
	And someone I respected greatly.
	Even though I thought some of his political ideas were outdated, that whole thing about, you know, there's two Americas, one for the rich, one for the poor.
	I think that ended during the Depression.
	I didn't think if he ran, he would get elected.
	I thought he could be nominated, but I thought his message was too outdated, and I don't think he thought I agree with him.
	Yeah, I definitely agree with him.
	I mean, he was a friend to us.
	I put it that way.
	Unlike his son.
	Andrew, well, it's good to know, though, that he actually isn't abusive or handsy.
	He's just Italian.
	So there's that.
	Who knows?
	Andrew Cuomo, that's what he said.
	He didn't abuse any of those women.
	He's just Italian.
	You know what his downfall really was?
	He's a bully.
	And he turned everybody against him.
	Andrew.
	Yeah, Andrew.
	Andrew.
	He's an abusive type of guy.
	He wasn't well liked.
	He had some loyalty that he bought, you know, just people around him.
	But at the end of the day, when you're a bully and you mistreat people like that, the tide is going to turn.
	Now, somebody say Michael Trump is a bully.
	Okay.
	You know, would you say, because the argument could go from the other side.
	Well, Trump bullied a lot of guys as well on his way up.
	But you know what?
	The people around Trump really like him.
	Interesting.
	The Paul Manaforts, the Corey Lewandowskis, people that were close to him, they like him.
	Look, you can say what you want about Trump.
	I believe Trump really cared about America.
	He cared about it.
	And whether it was his ego, whatever it is that he wanted to be, the best possible guy he can be in there for the country, I think that's what he wanted to be.
	Whatever motivated him, I don't know.
	But I feel it really meant something for him to do well for the country, for America that he believed in.
	And that's why I supported him.
	Would you have been able to accomplish what you accomplished in the gas cam without Mario Cuomo's help?
	Yes, because the licenses I obtained were not through Cuomo.
	Okay.
	It was somebody else.
	But I needed those licenses, and they were tough to get.
	And I was able to get them.
	And that's what kind of separated me from a lot of the guys because I had 18 licenses.
	So you couldn't, unless you indicted me and put me in jail, you couldn't stop my business.
	Can I ask a question?
	This is a little off topic, but I think it's very appropriate for this segment.
	You being a New Yorker, we just saw Rudy Giuliani.
	We talked about the Cuomos.
	Pat's first day in your financial career was the day before 9-11.
	It's this weekend.
	It's now Saturday.
	So two days from now.
	So tomorrow for me, it's going to be 20 years.
	Oh, gotcha.
	20 years.
	So you being a New Yorker, we're talking about Rudy.
	I'm just opening it up for conversation.
	It's a 20-year anniversary of 9-11.
	We just left Afghanistan.
	It's all over the news.
	There's no specific question, but just what comes to mind when you circulate through all these stories.
	Well, listen, because I just saw Rudy, I mean, I gained a lot of respect for him as mayor of New York because he brought that city back.
	You don't know what New York.
	He was America's mayor.
	Yes, and you don't know what New York was like prior to that.
	You know, I'll tell you a story.
	I was out on, I forget if I was, you know, I got busted on a parole violation, and I had been out in New York for several years.
	And they were driving me back.
	I had to go in front of Judge Henderson Morrison here.
	So I was with the marshals in the car.
	We're driving back.
	And I said, hey, guys, what time have we got to be in court?
	He said, we got a couple hours.
	I said, do me a favor.
	He said, what?
	I said, let's drive around.
	I haven't seen the city in a while.
	He says, well, what do you want?
	I said, I want two things.
	I want Dunkin' Donuts because I haven't had that in a year.
	You're a Starbucks guy.
	What's going on?
	No, I was Dunkin' Donuts all the way.
	I said, and I want to drive through Manhattan.
	I haven't been here.
	And when they took me down to Times Square, I could not believe the Reformation.
	Yeah, she packing.
	This is my homie.
	This was right after Juliana got into office.
	He was there a couple of years ago.
	90s.
	Dude, my father wouldn't let my mother bring me and my sisters to the city.
	Oh, it was terrible.
	You know that you could get off the bridge on Houston Street, and I am not kidding.
	And people of my age know, you would have 100 prostitutes coming up to the car, right on the street, coming up to the car, rolling down your window, 100 of them every single day.
	It was smut city.
	It was just terrible.
	Times Square, you didn't even want to go to the theaters.
	It was all peep shows.
	You know, now the main peep show now is an NYPD department there.
	But it was terrible.
	And the Reformation of Times Square alone, what he did there, and to clean up the city.
	The city, you know, when Dinkins was the mayor, it was a party for us because anything went.
	Anything what we were doing.
	But it was just a terrible place.
	Bronx was burning in the late 70s.
	Bronx was the worst city in the country.
	It was terrible.
	What comes to your mind, Pat?
	In regards to this.
	We were talking about 9-11, New York, your 20-year financial career, everything else.
	Listen, so I had the, by the way, David, if you're listening to this, David, you, David, David, David, we got to make sure that Captain Tager goes out on 9-11.
	Okay, just make a note of that because the captain of the spokesperson of APA, that's got to go out on 9-11.
	Got it.
	Yeah, because one of the things I asked him, I asked him a few different questions.
	So this is the guy that's always on MSNBC, CNBC, on CNN, on Fox.
	Follow him up, guy?
	He's everywhere.
	Okay, Captain Tager is his last name.
	Captain Tager.
	I think it's Dennis Tager.
	Yeah, Dennis Tager.
	I nailed it.
	He's an absolute stud of a guy.
	And we were having a conversation.
	He said, I asked him about, hey, so TSA numbers are up.
	It's only 10% down from what it was in 2019.
	So people are traveling again.
	You know, should we feel safe travel again?
	A lot of private jet businesses, charters taking off right now.
	Are you worried about it?
	He says, no, I want the wealthier to get wealthier because the more money the rich make, my business takes off.
	So I'm like very interesting as a union guy to say something like that.
	And then we went and talked about a few other things.
	And then finally, I talked to him about 9-11.
	I said, so a question for you in regards to 9-11.
	Do you worry with what happened with Afghanistan, with the Taliban, that another 9-11 could potentially happen?
	And if yes, how are we prepared for it?
	You know, what is the difference between today and then?
	I mean, obviously, we know TSA.
	George Bush came out with TSA in November of 01, two months after 9-11 came.
	We didn't have TSA before.
	It was just kind of like you went on a flight.
	I don't know if you remember, it was a lot better.
	Smoother.
	You didn't take two hours to prepare to go on a flight.
	Boom, you went off.
	You could also go to someone's, like if your friend was coming to town, pick him up, you don't have to go through TSA.
	Very different.
	Some may say it's good, some may say it's bad.
	The reality is it's longer to get on a flight, but at the same time, it's safer, right?
	So you're going through it.
	Much harder to do a romantic gesture.
	For sure.
	So I said, so how much harder is it today to conduct another 9-11?
	And he started talking about stats.
	He says, first of all, there's certain things that we have on every flight that I can't tell you about.
	Now, you need to know on every flight there's a federal agent, and he walked through it on certain investments.
	On every single flight, there's a federal agent.
	He says on every flight, there's a federal agent.
	Wow.
	Is what he's saying.
	Now, whether that's true or not, maybe it's not.
	Maybe it's my misunderstanding.
	The way he said it is there's a federal agent on every flight.
	And then at the same time, they have a method.
	He says, but there's one thing that he was pissed off about, that he wanted them to pass the bill.
	And the APA is right now doing something to pass the bill, is for every one of these planes to invest $10,000 to create another layer of protection in case somebody decides to do something so they can have 10 minutes to be able to prevent whoever is trying to take over the plane for that to not become a reality.
	So there's one other layer that he wants to add to it.
	But he says, look, I'm not going to lie to you.
	We are paranoid like you wouldn't believe.
	We still worry about if another 9-11 could happen or not.
	So you asked that question for me.
	I think in the last three weeks, it just became more the person.
	If there are odds in Vegas where you can bet on another 9-11 happened in the last three weeks, it went up.
	It went up.
	You know how all of a sudden, hey, the Lakers traded and they picked up, you know, Anthony Davis.
	The line just went 20 to 1 to 3 to 1.
	Okay, so if you bet the week before your head, the line of today, another 9-11 happened, went higher.
	Yesterday we're having dinner and your wife says, I'm not traveling on 9-11.
	I just feel weird traveling on 9-11.
	You know, now what?
	She also said it could be the safest day of the year if you're traveling because everybody's more paranoid.
	But still, that thought is there.
	I feel the same way.
	Yeah.
	You wouldn't travel on 9-11.
	I'm not.
	I mean, I'm here.
	I'm not going home.
	Would you want your wife, your kids, your family traveling on 9-11?
	Not if you want peace of mind.
	No, I don't think that's something that doesn't give you peace of mind traveling on 9-11, right?
	I think I would actually probably think that we are on red alert on 9-11, 20-year anniversary.
	Everything's on red alert.
	I don't know.
	I don't know if I buy that because let me explain to you.
	Everything about how the Afghanistan experience was handled, it was so sloppy.
	To me, it says everything else is sloppy.
	I had a call the other day with my C-suite executives, and we were talking about something.
	I told a couple of our leaders, I said, success softens people up, right?
	So when you win and you're like, oh my gosh, I just made a million bucks.
	I just made a you get comfortable, buddy.
	And when you get comfortable and arrogant, you are officially exposed and somebody can exploit you.
	If I'm an enemy and I don't like America, matter of fact, if I'm an enemy and I hate America, okay, if there's ever been an administration that is handling things in a sloppy way, that if you wanted to do some damage to America, unfortunately, unfortunately, this is the season.
	Unfortunately.
	Because you're sitting there with your opponent.
	You're like, dude, what is the matter?
	Like, imagine you're dating a girl and you go to a girl's house and you want to meet her dad.
	And you see the dad.
	He's like, I'm sorry, what's your name?
	I'm Adam.
	Okay.
	What do you do for a living?
	I'm in school.
	Do you have a job?
	Yeah, I'm 18 years old.
	You going to school?
	I am.
	What are you majoring in?
	I want to be an accountant.
	Why do you want to be an accountant?
	My dad's an accountant.
	So tell me about some of your, tell me about your mom and dad.
	My mom's a nurse.
	Are they still married?
	They've been married 22 years.
	Do you have any siblings?
	I have a sister.
	Okay, good.
	So he goes through a series of 45 questions: like, what the hell is wrong with this guy, right?
	And then he says, I want you to meet my son.
	Then a 28-year-old son shows up.
	How are you, Adam?
	I'm John.
	Shakes your hand.
	Hey, this is my sister.
	It's my only sister.
	I just want to make sure you know that.
	If anything happens to my sister, whatever you do to my sister, I'm going to do to you.
	Just so you know that.
	Okay, great.
	So you leave, right?
	Now you go to another girl's house.
	You go in.
	Oh, hey, Adam, Harry, tell me about you.
	You want a drink?
	You want me to get you something?
	You guys have some fun tonight.
	Grab the keys.
	You, as a boy who has one thing in mind, you're saying what?
	Dude, slam dunk.
	I don't need to worry about the dad with the second girl or a brother, but the first one, shit, if I do something, the dad and the brother is going to come after me.
	I'm not doing nothing with Jackie.
	But hey, Mary, let's go out.
	I don't have to worry about you.
	Jackie is Biden.
	That's America today.
	Ain't nobody afraid today.
	And that's a scary thought.
	That's a scary thought.
	Yesterday, Trump was on who's the late night guy, Gutfield.
	What's a Gutfield?
	Yeah, Gutfield.
	And they were talking to each other.
	And Gutfield asked a question.
	He says, Look, I was never a fan of you.
	And he says, I never supported you, Gutfield, because he said a lot of bad things about him.
	He says, no, I understand.
	I said, but I think maybe eventually you started liking me and maybe even loving me.
	He says, I don't love you.
	Maybe there's apparatus.
	Gutfield's talking to who?
	Trump.
	Yeah, so they're talking face to face.
	And then Gutfield asks, Do you think it's important for us to, for the enemy to fear the leader?
	He says, I don't know about fear.
	I think it's about competency and respect.
	I don't know if the enemy is sitting there saying these guys are competent enough to handle next 9-11.
	So that concerns me a lot in regards to.
	You got a vice president who can't get asked even a semi-hard question without breaking out into some sort of maniacal laughter cackle like she's the joker.
	Got Jen Sackey coming out yesterday saying there's going to be new mandates.
	And she gets asked a really simple follow-up.
	Is this going to have an effect on everyday American people?
	And she looks like the Grinch, furrows her brows, and goes, only the unvaccinated.
	Like, this is what we're dealing with.
	Like, it's like comical.
	It's like the villains have taken over Gotham.
	It's almost like on the comic book list.
	You know what, Patrick?
	People ask me, you know, you're a staunch Republican.
	I'm not a staunch Republican.
	I'm for who I believe is going to do the best job for the country.
	You know, I have to say this.
	This is the worst leadership in my lifetime by far.
	I mean, not even close.
	I mean, that's crazy.
	You live through Carter.
	I mean, that's a big statement.
	These people appear to be so incompetent.
	They can't get out of their own way.
	It's scary.
	I really, you know, I was thinking about it.
	I was going to put something together.
	You know, in the opening line of the Gotti movie, it's brilliant where Armand DeSanti is in jail.
	He's talking to a guy through the glass.
	And he said, 20 years from now, they're going to miss Cosan Ostra.
	20 years from now, they're going to miss John Gotti.
	It's like I want to flash back and say, three years from now, they're going to miss the Republican Party.
	Three years from now, they're going to miss Donald Trump.
	Not because of, just because of the way he ran the country.
	That's it, you know?
	And it drives me crazy, Republican, Democrat.
	You got to put the guy in that's doing the best job for the country.
	That's it.
	It's not a question of per for me.
	It's never about personality.
	It's about policy.
	That's it.
	What's best for my country, for my kids and my grandchildren?
	That's what I look at.
	I went to an oyster place in Boston.
	We walk in.
	Hostess shows up, gives an attitude to me and Mario.
	I said to her, I said, you know what?
	I said, you're not a hostess.
	You may be a good person in the back.
	You may be good at handling accounting.
	You may be good at monitoring stuff on camera to see if anybody's stealing anything.
	You may be somebody that can do a lot of other things.
	You were never meant to be a hostess.
	So I said, don't take this as, don't be offended by this.
	I had an assistant once.
	A guy's name is Hutan.
	Good looking Persian kid.
	The worst assistant I ever had.
	I love the guy till today.
	He knows it.
	I talk about him.
	So I said, Hutan, I got good news.
	I got bad news for you.
	He says, which one do you?
	I said, which one do you want?
	He says, I want the bad news.
	I said, you're a terrible employee.
	And he says, why?
	I said, I'm your assistant.
	He says, I'm telling you what you need to do for me.
	I said, this is pathetic.
	I said, you want the good news?
	He says, yeah, what's the good news?
	I said, the good news is you're a butterfly.
	You're free.
	Go do whatever you want to do.
	He says, God, I'm so glad you said this because I want to go surf every single big wave around the world.
	He did that for seven, eight years.
	Happiest kid alive.
	Met a girl, introduced me to her when I was in Santana.
	They got married.
	He's the happiest camper out there.
	What's my point here?
	Joe Biden's not a good number one.
	He could be a good number eight, a good number five.
	I think I'm sure 43 years of experience is going to give a lot of insight.
	Here's what happened.
	Here's what happened.
	Fine.
	He's not a good number one.
	There's a very big difference between being a number five, a number eight, a number one.
	People learned a long time ago you could not win a championship building around Carmelo Anthony, as great as he was.
	You cannot win building around certain players.
	This was a topic with my friend Steve Avetian, and he would say, I would say, I think you can build a team around Russell Westbrook.
	He says, you have no clue what you're talking about.
	I said, what are you talking about?
	He says, you cannot build around Russell Westbrook to win a championship.
	He needs to be a two or a three for you to win a championship.
	Look at the way this guy broke.
	And by the way, this argument was seven years ago, six years ago.
	Who's right?
	He's right.
	So I don't know.
	I think we forget that the number one job isn't everyone's job.
	We have to come up with a criteria on what it is to be number one.
	And as much as I understand, well, you know, he's a nice guy.
	He's cool.
	He's this.
	He's that.
	When you're running a country that's as big as it is today, and you got people who hate you because you've been dominating for such a long time, you do not want to have a guy that's leading that, that's a softie, that isn't a bit paranoid, that doesn't have the energy, that doesn't have the audacity to just sit there and answer the tough questions.
	You need somebody that can lead that.
	It's not everyone's job.
	There's actually one of the most famous quotes in The Sopranos about that.
	Tony Soprano is getting into Christopher Mosanti's, getting into him.
	And the late James Gandolfini was phenomenal in that role.
	And he basically says exactly that.
	He's like, you have no idea what it's like to have to make all the decisions.
	No way.
	And then when at the end of the day, after you made him, you've got to live with him and you and you alone.
	He's that's something that you'll never have to do.
	Do you remember at the end of last dance when Michael started crying?
	Do you know that scene where he's like, you know what?
	You don't want this life.
	You don't want this life.
	You didn't win is what it is.
	And I wanted it.
	I wanted her to win.
	He says, we need to take a break.
	He just got up and walked out.
	And I just felt it right now in my body, just even thinking about that entire scene, right?
	Look, everybody wants to be a number one until they're a number one.
	And they say, shit, I don't want to be a number one.
	Heavy the crown.
	It's not everyone's job.
	Heavy the head that wears the crowd.
	If you go to Smithsonian, they show the whole evolution of what happened to Lincoln.
	I don't know if you've seen that from the first year he got elected to like second year, third year, fourth year.
	If you've never seen that, it's not his.
	Yeah, it's not everyone's job.
	He was during a Civil War.
	And that's a real tough time to be a president where he was trying to find his own until he found his General Grant.
	Met Clemen, he couldn't count on.
	He couldn't count on any of those guys.
	But it's not everyone's job to be number one.
	Well, Michael, you said something before about, you know, you don't care about whether it's Democrat or Republican.
	You just want the right person for the job.
	And what you were talking about before, Adam, what I remember most about 9-11 is right after it happened.
	You know, I grew up in the shadow of the towers.
	The towers were beautiful.
	The Freedom Tower is gorgeous, don't get me wrong, but there was just something about those two towers sitting at the end of the end of the island there.
	And I grew up 15 miles outside the city.
	We saw them come down.
	And in the carnage, in the wreckage, my uncles were in there, firefighters.
	And, you know, both of my uncles and my grandfather, local 40, they worked on the towers.
	They built them.
	And then they were part of the cleanup.
	Everything was gray.
	It's a devastating picture.
	You look at it.
	When the towers come down, there's so much ash.
	You actually can't tell who's black, who's white.
	You can't tell what race.
	It's people that they look like they just got through a 12-round fight.
	They're walking around like, my God, what just happened?
	And then 10 days after, to kind of put a bow on this, we started with baseball.
	I was at, I'm sorry, I think it was 13 days after.
	Went to a funeral for my dad that worked in downtown and we went to a funeral.
	And then we went to a Met game after against the Braves and had this massive comeback and Piazza hit a home run.
	And it was like, I don't know if anybody ever sees it or goes on YouTube, watch Piazza's whole brother.
	Place from Christian.
	Oh, the whole country.
	You had Sammy Sosa running with the flag.
	It was amazing.
	There was no Democrats.
	There was no Republicans.
	No white, no black.
	We were Americans.
	We don't have that today, though.
	We kept saying, never forget, man.
	20 years later, we forgot, dude.
	And it's not only that.
	The Democratic Party today is not what it was 20, 30 years ago.
	It was a legitimate party.
	Today, you can't even call it Democrats anymore.
	Progressive, liberal, left, whatever.
	It's a different party.
	The party of John F. Kennedy and prior to that, different than what it is today.
	That's not what your country could do for you.
	That's what you could do for your country.
	Imagine Democrats saying to that today.
	You know, Anas just gave 10 bucks and he says, Pat, Pat, you're a war monger.
	Just because we left Afghanistan does not mean 9-11 will happen.
	Quite the opposite.
	Also, 60 Israelis were arrested on 9-11.
	Stop the BS.
	Okay.
	So 60 Israelis were arrested on 9-11.
	So, meaning they also had some level of involvement.
	Anas, I will tell you this.
	And we've had Anasan before when you talk about Palestine.
	He's Palestinian.
	If you remember Anas when he talked to the other Israeli and they were going back and forth with the whole challenge, so we know the optics of where Anas is at.
	Anas, this is what I will tell you.
	I have no desire to be in Afghanistan.
	We should have never gone the first place.
	We understand there was a business element to what happened in Afghanistan.
	There was a lot of money being made in Afghanistan, a lot of nice contracts that was being made in Afghanistan.
	I don't know the details too, but some of the conspiracies don't sound like conspiracies.
	They sound like things that actually could have happened, and I give it some credence.
	What I care about is sequencing.
	I said it yesterday on Facebook.
	I don't care about staying in Afghanistan.
	I care about sequencing.
	When a leader gets sloppy, when a leader gets sloppy and is not competent to know what are his next 5, 10, 15 moves on leaving Afghanistan, you can give 10 different leaders and tell them, we want to leave Afghanistan.
	We're going to do a case study right now.
	You and your team go in that room.
	You and your team go in that room.
	You and your team go in this room.
	In the next two hours, I want everybody to come out with one spokesperson of each camp, talk about what is the best, most optimum way to leave Afghanistan.
	Ready?
	Go to your teams.
	Everybody goes in their offices.
	Two hours later, everybody comes back.
	Johnny has team number one, team number two, team number three.
	And they say, here's what I think we need to leave Afghanistan.
	Then the person that's moderating that group says, I think the best plan was given by three, seven, and nine.
	Let's map out the 15 moves.
	Your move number three could be catastrophic.
	That's the mistake.
	This isn't about us staying there.
	The mistake is sequencing.
	And sequencing only happens in the wrong way when the leader is casual, no energy, afraid, and hides.
	That's the problem.
	What happened with Afghanistan is 100% sequencing problem.
	And that's why now we have to hear all the stories.
	$83 billion of equipment that was left behind to those guys for what?
	Why would military go first?
	Why would they not go last?
	So this isn't a conversation about all the other methods.
	While they're demanding $3.5 trillion in new human infrastructure, they just leave $90 billion behind.
	The administration is asking about, well, hey, the Taliban, you don't have enough women in your administration.
	What the hell are you talking about?
	Like, what are you talking about?
	What does that matter?
	Do you even think they, like, do you think they carry?
	Do you know how they view women in the country where I came from?
	Like, how do you think these guys view women?
	If you only knew, if the left only knew how they treated women and the LGBTQ community, you would fully be on a different side if you knew how they treated gays, lesbians, and women in the country with all this mess that's taking place.
	All that is is a deflection.
	You know, they're pandering to their base, trying to get women on their side, deflecting what's really going on there.
	That's what they do all the time.
	Everything is a deflection.
	You know, it's mind-boggling that some of the things that you just said, the chaos that was there, I can't understand it.
	I don't know.
	Afghanistan now?
	Yes.
	Can I say one thing?
	There's no wrong thing.
	Because obviously we've been kind of going down a path here.
	Let me just put some facts out there.
	And this might be controversial, whatever.
	We're leaving Afghanistan.
	Okay.
	I think even the left, or I don't even like using left or right.
	I think even mainstream media is calling out Biden for how sloppy this is.
	Certainly it could have gotten better.
	Different perspective.
	Obviously, we all want to bring Americans home, have our allies be safe.
	Short term, it's a shit show.
	Long term, though, who do we really need to be focusing on?
	Not so much the Middle East anymore.
	We need to be focusing our attention on China.
	They just double the troop size in Syria, dude.
	Okay.
	Hear me out here, George.
	They took the troops out of Afghanistan.
	They moved them to Syria.
	It's not like they came home.
	But the big picture is we need to be focusing on China.
	And, you know, our problem in our government is we can't walk and chew gum at the same time.
	I know we've got 800 bases all over the world.
	The real problem these days is not the Middle East.
	It's the Far East.
	So if it takes getting ugly and messy in Afghanistan in the short term for our long term to wake up and say, China's the real threat these days.
	China's the real enemy.
	Long term, there might be some major benefits there.
	So that's just a different perspective.
	Nobody's happy of what's happening in Afghanistan right now.
	But then again, for the last 20 years, nobody gave two shits about Afghanistan.
	We all wanted to get out of there.
	So like I said on a couple of podcasts ago, it's very easy to get into a war.
	It's very ugly and hard to get out of a war.
	Especially when it's profitable.
	You don't want to get out when $24 trillion are spent in 20 years and 21 of that 24 trillion go to private defense contractors.
	And now it's going to be someone else's mess to clean up.
	Yes.
	Again, an ugly exit.
	But now Pakistan, China, India, Russia, this is a regional situation.
	We have the luxury of having two beautiful oceans, one that's very cold on the left side, one that's very warm on the right side to secure our borders.
	Whereas in the Middle East and in the Far East, it's all intertwined.
	And this is China's problem now or India's problem or Pakistan's problem.
	Thankfully, hopefully long term, not an American problem.
	Yeah, the problem is, though, I think it was a lot less of a problem before this chaotic exit that we had.
	And now it could be another breeding ground for terrorism.
	And you got to understand this.
	And Patrick, you should bear me out.
	They don't hate anybody as much as they hate America.
	That's true.
	Agreed.
	So I think that's what I'm saying.
	And whether we're there or not there, they're still going to hate us.
	I understand, but they have more power now.
	They have more leverage.
	Okay, we can still take down terrorists like we've been doing for decades and decades and decades without having to build a nation.
	We were never going to rebuild a democracy in Afghanistan.
	It was never going to happen.
	Let me ask this.
	So whether we said we're leaving on this day or this day or just kind of like leave in the middle of the night, Taliban's not going anywhere.
	You guys have both ran large companies.
	You guys have both been in charge of hierarchical structures, right?
	When you look at your competitors and you see them mishandling situations like this, does something go off inside of you?
	Is it like blood in the water for sharks and you say, okay, we need to exploit this while it's happening now?
	Is this something that catches your attention when your competitors are fumbling the ball this bad?
	Or is this something where you say, you know, what's the greater play here?
	Like, maybe there's a greater strategy at play.
	Oh, for me, absolutely.
	Especially on the street.
	When you see weakness in your competitor, you strike.
	That's it.
	100%.
	Sun Tzu says when an enemy is about to make a big mistake to fall, get out of their way.
	Okay.
	So, which means just you don't even need to get in the way.
	They're going to.
	Now, in sports, Belarus never stopped an enemy from displaying it.
	Never, never let a, what do you call it?
	What is an interception called?
	It's called a war.
	Never let a turnover go to waste.
	Like, you see how a guy, you got possession, do something about it.
	Capitalize, you screwed up, right?
	You know, the whole Atlanta Falcons against Brady, the year they were supposed to win, I was like, What the hell are you guys doing?
	You just keep him 15 plays that could have gone the other way.
	And they were passing up by hell and he's like, What is yeah?
	So, I don't think there's a right answer.
	I think it's all on situational of where you're at.
	In a situation like this, I agree with you.
	By the way, Nas, I heard your second comment, Mrs. Pat, and now that you said it this way, I agree with you.
	But going back to what you said, Adam, I agree with you because here's where we're at here with the entire situation.
	So, the number one enemy in the world for USS Who, number one enemy, China, okay, China, the Democratic Party.
	Some people, well, first of all, no, you know, Alexander said, I have no difference between the Democratic Party.
	Alexander, Alexander said, I have met the enemy, it is I. Alexander said, I have met the enemy, it is I.
	So, America's biggest enemy is themselves.
	But let's set that aside.
	After us being our own worst enemy, then it's who, China.
	Taliban came out and said, Our biggest ally is who?
	China.
	Something very strange happened this week by two personalities that, you know, when you think about Ray Dalio or George Soros, you think George Soros is what?
	He's the biggest funder of Antifa.
	He's the biggest funder.
	You don't think about George Soros, who would say, Let's be careful with China.
	But here's what happened this week.
	Very interesting.
	One story is a business insider story about Ray Dalio, whom I interviewed, one of my favorite interviews that I did.
	Hedge from billionaire Ray Dalio says, Investors shouldn't ignore investing opportunities in China, even after the recent market turmoil.
	Business insider.
	Billionaire investor Ray Dalio told Bloomberg that opportunities in China and Singapore can't be neglected.
	It's a part of the world that one can't neglect, and not only because of the opportunities it provides, but you lose the excitement if you're not there.
	Dalio said when asked about his family office plan in the region.
	And so our objective is to be there both economically and investment-wise.
	This is Ray Dalio.
	Then George Soros comes out, and it's a CNN story.
	He calls out Ray Dalio.
	George Soros calls out BlackRock's China blunder.
	The billionaire financier philanthropist thinks BlackRock has made a huge miscalculation on China.
	BlackRock recently started offering investment products to individual Chinese investors as the country's first entirely foreignly owned fund management firm.
	But Soros slammed the move, claiming the company appears to misunderstand President Xi's China.
	Soros highlighted Xi's recent crackdown on private business, which he sees as proof that the regime regards all Chinese companies as instruments of the one-party state.
	He also referenced an enormous crisis brewing in China's real estate market and Xi's effort to redistribute wealth.
	These trends, he said, do not auger well for foreign investors.
	Soros also thinks that BlackRock's initiative is a threat to democracies because the money invested in China will help prop up President Xi's regime, which is repressive at home and aggressive abroad.
	Very confusing for Soros to make a comment like that about China.
	Who would know better than him?
	But for him to say, stay away from China, that's, you know.
	You mentioned something earlier, really, really adroit about the inner circle having special.
	Yeah, this to me reeks, and this is pure speculation, but this to me reeks of a guy who was promised a seat on the inner circle, did everything he was told to do, funded everybody he was told to fund, and didn't get a seat on the inner circle.
	That he was used, that he was never going to be a part of it.
	You think this is a direct thing between him and Dalio or him and the current administration?
	I think it's somebody that tried to get in to bed with Xi and then found out who Xi really is.
	And this is the truth of the matter, and this is something the whole world has to understand.
	That's actually not bad about who Xi Jinping is.
	By the way, that's actually not bad.
	Xi Jinping is going, he is going to take over the world or he is going to die trying.
	People do not pay attention to what's coming out of China.
	They do not pay attention when this man speaks.
	Xi Jinping is an ambitious man on a level we haven't seen in 100 years.
	Your guy, General Spalding, talks about this, and there's also been other people that you've interviewed with on the 100-year marathon.
	Xi Jinping has accelerated that progress, and he is completely unabashed in his own speeches about his plans for the future.
	And they do not include a world of democratic response to government.
	He thinks government should be in control of everything.
	He thinks there should be one world government, and it should be his government under his control.
	He believes in global confidence.
	I think that's great news, though.
	Let me tell you why I think that's great news.
	Here's why it's great news.
	Say you and I hate each other.
	We sincerely hate each other.
	We're enemies.
	Whatever.
	You're a real estate company.
	I'm a real estate company.
	We can't stand each other.
	You defend one guy.
	I defend this guy.
	That guy's a really bad guy, but you keep defending him.
	Okay.
	So you go on bed with him and try to do business with him.
	He royally screws you over.
	Royally.
	Which kind of seems like it's this kind of seems like it.
	Then you sit there and say, freaking Pat, he's not as bad as I thought he was.
	Let me call Pat.
	So he indirectly got us closer, which is a good thing.
	So the fact that Xi is doing that in China and it's now getting Democrats and Republicans to both agree on the fact that you cannot take China lightly, that is a very good news for America.
	We can oppose a lot of different things.
	It's fine.
	But there's one thing you do not want the left and the right to not agree on, and that's China.
	Is that my enemy's enemy?
	Is now my ally?
	Was that what that was?
	Yeah, so Xi essentially essentially made Soros defend America, which Soros, you know his reputation for 20 years of destabilizing America.
	Are you kidding me?
	Soros is maybe one of the most hated guys in America on many different lists because the guy's got power, money, and he's a manipulator.
	Literally actively destabilizing the country.
	No, no, and he's involved in a lot of different things that he did.
	So when I saw this message, I'm like, what the hell is going on for Soros to say something like that?
	This is one of those things.
	Not everything's black and white.
	There's a lot of gray and all this.
	Even in the Middle East, you use your Syria example.
	You have the Shiites and the Sunnis and then ISIS and they're fighting Al-Qaeda, but Al-Qaeda's not friends in the Taliban and the Talbot Sunni.
	And then actually we're friends with these people up here.
	And then in Kashmir, they have Friday with them.
	And it's just like, you know, what reminds me?
	You can't even solve it.
	Remember in the last Batman movie, The Christopher Nolan, with Bane, Tom Hardy playing Bane?
	And then, you know, the businessman thinks that he's got Bane under control.
	And he's like, you get over here.
	And Bane's like, I'm already here.
	And he says, he finally puts his hand on the guy's shoulder.
	Leave.
	Oh, no, don't leave.
	I'm in control here.
	Do you feel in charge?
	And then the guy realizes in this moment, oh, man, I made a deal with the devil.
	And he turns to the guy and he says, I paid you a small fortune.
	And Bane looks at him and says, and this gives you power over me?
	Snap.
	And that's Xi Jinping.
	Xi Jinping is looking at all these capitalist dummies saying, you know, I've given you.
	But I love that.
	I've given you 20 years of power.
	I love that.
	Here's why I love that.
	I love that a person like that reveals his ambitions publicly because now it unites two different parties.
	I love it.
	If it doesn't get on the TV.
	But listen, Soros has influence with the left.
	They listen to Soros.
	So when he says it, you have to know.
	Like, imagine the people are like, okay, who said it?
	O'Reilly said it.
	It must be right.
	Okay.
	Who said it?
	Anderson Cooper.
	It must be right.
	Okay, who said it?
	Don Laman.
	It must be right.
	Rachel Maddox must be right.
	Hey, Tucker Crosser.
	There is that community.
	So now, okay, George Soros said that China sucks.
	That's fine.
	I actually think this is great.
	Now, there's a part of it which, you know, you heard what Rudy Giuliani says, well, I supported him for the governorship because I needed money for funding.
	That's politics right there.
	You just heard it, right?
	He said that.
	So we don't know that part of what happened, who got offended, who got upset.
	Because at that level, when you're a billionaire, man, most of your life, you've been winning a lot of the fights.
	You've been winning a lot if you're a billionaire, right?
	It's not like you've been losing.
	You've been winning a lot.
	You've been losing too, but you've been winning a lot.
	So you're not accustomed to not being right.
	So Soros maybe is not happy with somebody we don't know about.
	Yeah.
	Soros is 91 years old, by the way.
	But he is.
	Just to put it in perspective, it's not like he's got big plans for himself.
	Like you said, he wants to sit and be in the inner circle of China.
	His kids, too.
	His kids are going to be a good man.
	To say himself.
	He's 91.
	Now, I don't know if you.
	What's your point with that?
	No, no, just pointing out that's how old he is.
	Old as shit.
	Yeah, but 91 years old.
	Do you think a guy that gets to his age, Kirk Kokorian was doing deals at 99 years old before he died?
	I mean, John Wooden died at 99 years old at Ronald Reagan Hospital in L.A.
	So do you think a guy like that, you think the fire is missing?
	You think a fire is not there?
	That's a true believer.
	Is the fire missing?
	Probably not.
	Are the skills still where they're at?
	Pull up a picture of George Soros.
	The only father that matters is thank you.
	My father at 101 was talking about opening up businesses.
	So when that's in your head, it doesn't matter.
	And he made it to 104?
	103.
	Wow.
	That's ridiculous.
	Yeah.
	By the way, what's the story?
	What happened with Fauci and Rand Paul?
	Can you pull up that story for us to read it?
	You were talking about it at dinner last night.
	It came out, I believe it was the Intercept, that Fauci apparently had completely lied.
	In which part?
	Under oath in Congress.
	Lied again.
	Yeah, the last time that he came out.
	It's moments like this where I do wish the mob was kind of still involved in our government, to be honest with you.
	Rand Paul says the new Wuhan documents show Fauci, like, can you go up a little bit to see if I, okay, public documents revealing the extent of U.S.-funded coronavirus research in Wuhan shows the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease head Anthony Fauci lied during his previous testimony to Congress.
	Faucian has adamantly denied that the National Institute of Health funded gain of function research in Wuhan.
	Paul blasted Fauci in a Tuesday tweet saying that the NAID director had lied again, and I was right about his agency funding novel coronavirus research at Wuhan.
	Said Rand Paul, go up a little bit because of tweets down here.
	Rand Paul tweet, surprise, surprise, Fauci lied again, and I was right about his agency funding novel coronavirus research at Wuhan.
	Read this thread and the papers release.
	Can you click on that just to see what that is?
	Is it a formal request to the Justice Department to open an investigation?
	Let's read this.
	Let's read this.
	So newly released documents provide detail of U.S.-funded research on coronavirus at the Wuhan and Servirology.
	The Intercept has obtained more than 900 pages of document detailing work of EcoHealth Alliance at the Chinese lab.
	Their trove of documents includes two previously unpublished grant proposals that were funded by the NIAID, as well as the project updates relating to EcoHealth Alliance research, which is scrutinized, aimed, increased interest.
	And materials show Tony's Martin Health Company and contracts.
	The materials revealed that the resulting novel laboratory generates SARS-related coronavirus also could infect mice engineered to display human receptors on cells.
	Interesting.
	So what's going to happen now?
	Because yesterday somebody asked Jen Sacchi.
	She just walked up.
	That's the thing.
	You asked this question to Rudy.
	It was one of the best questions you had asked.
	You said, if you know these guys are corrupt and you have the evidence, all it takes is for one of them to crack.
	You just need one of them to crack and the rest of them will fall.
	Why is it?
	How come, you know, you talked about Omerta.
	How is it that these guys, nobody talks over there?
	And what he says is that nobody's threatening them.
	So the mafia never talked until we took all their stuff away, the racketeering act.
	You take somebody and you put them in a large conspiracy and say, hey, you may not have done all this, but you're attached to the guys who did all this.
	And are you going to go away for them?
	But you're right.
	Aren't you seeing what's happening here?
	Trump gets impeached for a phone call that he made, okay, that wasn't anywhere near as disastrous as the phone call that Biden made to the president of Afghanistan and asked him to lie, straight out lied to the world.
	And what happens?
	Crickets out of Pelosi.
	Nobody wants to say anything.
	This is such a corrupt system right now.
	It's such a double standard that we have.
	It's disgusting.
	I can't even believe it.
	If you and I were to do something like that, we'd be doing 100 years.
	It's terrible what's happening in this country.
	Do you think politicians on both sides lie?
	Absolutely.
	Okay.
	So let's put that side aside, meaning, you know, the left's going to lie, the right's going to lie.
	Okay.
	And the left is always going to show the one tweet or this guy was lying.
	And the right's going to say this guy was lying.
	Okay.
	Fine.
	So let's say there is sinners on both sides.
	And you know the saying, people sin in different ways.
	Okay.
	This is where I'm going with this.
	Put that aside.
	If a person's leading an army, if a person's leading a country, if a person's leading a family, okay, if a person's like, hey, where were you?
	You know, I was with my friends.
	Okay.
	And we were watching a game.
	Hey, what were you doing?
	What is the core need a country demands from their leader?
	Forget about the lying part.
	I don't think we've had a president that hasn't lied yet.
	Okay.
	Left, right, middle doesn't matter, right?
	So number one is safety, right?
	Okay, great.
	Would you agree with that?
	Safety is number one.
	Keep the country safe.
	Keep the country safe.
	Okay, so I don't care what you're saying, what you're spewing out, because sometimes, you know, we have pride and we're like, well, you know, no, And we're like, maybe over-exaggerated.
	You know, I don't think anybody's going to be innocent of that, right?
	Okay.
	Are we getting safety?
	What's next out of safety?
	I would say justice.
	Okay, so justice, fine.
	What is after justice?
	So justice is a form of safety to me, by the way, because justice provides me to know that a bigger guy's not going to bully me because I know law and order is going to protect.
	That's something I got to be honest with you.
	I've lost faith in over the last 10 years.
	I do not believe that we are all operating under the same set of rules.
	I think somebody, your political affiliation is going to determine whether you're innocent or guilty, not the actual committing of the crime.
	How can you hold one party accountable to one person accountable to something and let the other one go with the same crime?
	Patrick, this country is going crazy.
	I am a former criminal.
	Do you know that in San Francisco now, they are paying criminals not to shoot other people?
	What?
	Paying the money.
	$300.
	Yeah, but that's not new.
	What's going on in San Francisco?
	No, that's not even this particular story.
	It's the medical.
	San Francisco has been crumbling for.
	I understand, but you know, I don't know if you're not.
	Do you think this doesn't spread?
	How long?
	That's where Nancy Pelosi and Kamala Harris are from, and Diane Feinstein.
	Three of the most powerful people in our government are from San Francisco.
	That's their home.
	One of the greatest cities in the world.
	I know what you're growing mentality.
	But what I'm saying, I use the Biden-Trump thing because how could you hold somebody so accountable for something that they did and somebody did something even more grievous and you just crickets, you let it go.
	What's going on in this country is the double standard is horrible.
	The Justice Department can't be politicized, man.
	It just can't be.
	It is.
	It is, 100%.
	And again, bring this up.
	And I don't care who it is.
	Hunter Biden's laptop.
	Draw it.
	If you and I had information, just the stuff that we've heard, forget about what else might be on there.
	We would be doing 100 years.
	You would be in jail with no bail.
	You'd be doing 100 years.
	Engineer Wieners, too, and everybody forgets about that one.
	Well, I mean, but this is the president's son who is using his father's political power to ingratiate himself into, and I mean, and it's right out in the open.
	Has it been going on?
	Of course.
	But this is right out in the open.
	You have to act on stuff like this.
	And they're letting it go.
	Otherwise, people.
	Who's letting it go?
	In your opinion, what do you think they should do?
	And I'm not a Hunter Biden fan.
	I just not in the news.
	It's not like they can't go after them.
	Who should do something about it?
	Obviously, Justice Department.
	Biden's not going to do anything about it.
	The Justice Department.
	Okay.
	But it's controlled by the Democrats.
	We talk about January 6th and how serious that was, and that there was a January 6th commission.
	And there were hundreds of riots where people actually died.
	Billions of dollars of damage.
	They take over Portland.
	They take over the city of Portland.
	Americans.
	Patrick, you know what that's done?
	Nothing's done.
	You know what the biggest insult and slap in the face?
	I don't know if you've watched the recent thing on 9-11, the documentary.
	With Condoleezza Rice and all those guys, all of that.
	What do you think about it?
	I thought it was great.
	What's his name?
	The black film producer did it.
	What's your name?
	Tyler Perry?
	No, not Tyler.
	Spike Lee.
	Yeah, you got to watch it.
	It'll make you lopsid.
	Is it one-sided or no?
	No, it'll make you cry.
	He did a brilliant job.
	Okay.
	Spike Spike did a brilliant job.
	He's a good filmmaker.
	But no, here's the thing.
	Yeah, I'm just thinking of Mike Motor.
	I want to see what Michael was.
	We all remember the devastation of that day.
	We all remember.
	No question.
	There was nothing like it ever in our lifetime.
	For these people, AOC, and some of these people, to compare what happened on January 6th to what happened on 9-11 is the most disgusting thing I have ever heard.
	3,000 lives lost.
	A city, the worst thing that ever happened compared, you know, other than Pearl Harbor.
	And that was released all military.
	And for them to say that January 6th was worse than 9-11.
	They're saying this.
	AOC said a whole video about it.
	Pelosi said it.
	They're treating it worse than what he did.
	And Pelosi, these people just say these things and not held accountable to it.
	It's an insult to everybody that's not.
	Whatever side you're on in the aisle, that's just what.
	Yeah, it doesn't.
	It's not dumb.
	It's not dumb.
	It's worse than dumb.
	You don't insult people like this.
	It's dark and divisive, and it's offensive.
	I would put all of that.
	And she lives in New York.
	Yeah, but you have to realize, again, respect.
	The enemy has to get respect for her knowing how to move.
	Naive people who are looking to find a person that they hate because of whatever reasons, right?
	Like one of the guys I'm interviewing right now that we put on the list yesterday, you know, he, again, another guy that's a communist who hates capitalism because capitalists make a lot of money and it's not fair.
	I'm like, I can't wait to talk to guys like this.
	These are the types of guys I want to talk to.
	They're convincing.
	They get people to say this makes sense.
	Like AOC is very, very convincing.
	She's got, you know, you have to know.
	I'm telling you right now, there's a 10 to 20% chance AOC is going to be president of the United States one day.
	10 to 20?
	You're saying lower or higher?
	Oh, my God.
	Lower or higher?
	Please be lower.
	Please be lower.
	Okay.
	I'm willing to bet.
	I'm willing to bet right now.
	If she stays alive, she stays healthy.
	I'm willing to bet.
	She's going to be a president.
	She's got another 40 years.
	Let me tell you, she's doing something that Roger Stone said the most important thing for somebody to be a real candidate is what?
	Relevancy.
	As relevancy and eyeballs.
	Yeah.
	By the way, you like Logan Paul?
	That's a qualified guy that could be a president next 20 years.
	You can hate Logan Paul all you want.
	That guy is going to be a candidate to run for presidency once again.
	He's going to compete with Xi Jinping.
	Well, who's the girl that you even brought up her name?
	The girl, the governor of Christine No.
	Okay.
	Never heard of her.
	We talk politics all day long.
	I've never heard of her name.
	She's amazing.
	She says, never heard her name.
	Zero relevancy.
	So we've all heard of it.
	It's getting easier and easier to be sold on Joe Manchin.
	Joe Manchin's doing a lot of things.
	I've been calling for John.
	Joe Manchin's going to run, yo.
	I don't know if he's going to run.
	I don't think that's in his.
	He should, though.
	I don't think he's going to run.
	I don't think that's something that.
	By the way, let's talk about a story that has to do with what just happened this week regarding your former boss.
	You know, story came out with the fact that, you know, legendary Colombo boss Carmine Jr. Persico was a top echelon FBI informant.
	Court records say story came out.
	You dealt with him directly.
	You spent time with them.
	How much credence you give to this article, this story?
	That article was insulting.
	It was fabrication.
	I don't believe it in any way, shape, or form.
	Daily News should be ashamed of themselves for putting that on a front page with a picture of a rat.
	Listen, I knew Junior very well.
	He was no informant.
	He was no rat.
	You know, I hate that.
	You know, Patrick, I hate the term rat because, you know, all the internet warriors now, they throw that around like they know what they're talking about, you know.
	And it's a disgrace to even say that about the guy.
	And listen, I mean, he was my boss.
	He also put a contract on my life when I walked away, you know, so he wasn't happy with that move.
	But absolute, absolute nonsense.
	I'll read it to you.
	It says, official boss of the Colombo family on whose side, Greg Scarpa, the Colombo Capitol FBI informant, and Roy Lindley, DeVicio Scarpa's FBI handler, were working.
	Carmine Persico was himself since decades earlier in the government's employ as a member of its top echelon informant program, wrote attorney David Schoen, who submitted a document in July in a Brooklyn federal court filing aiming at getting his client, one-time acting Colombo boss Victor Orina, 87.
	We should spend a lot of time talking about him, 87 out of prison on compassionate release.
	Persico died in 2019 at 85.
	He served 32 years of his 136-year probation, prison sentence following his conviction in the Mafia Commission case.
	So you're saying there's zero credence to him being a rat?
	No, what they're saying there is Greg Scarpa, who we know was an informant for 20 some odd years, might have been trying to, maybe he got some information out of Persigo.
	Persigo didn't know that he was an informant, you know, Scarpa.
	So maybe some things coming from Persigo were going through Scarpa to the government, not with Persigo's knowledge.
	He didn't know that.
	By the way, Kai, do you have the Chin Chigante comment from, what do you call it, Rudy?
	If you're not from what Sammy and Michael said, because Rudy said something different about the Chin.
	I don't know if you have it.
	Is this the one or it's a different one?
	This is the one?
	Okay, so we talked about Chin and, you know, Chin's power, all that stuff.
	Rudy had a different thought.
	I'm curious to know what you have to say about what Rudy said.
	If you want to play it, Kai.
	We were going to do a big raid, and we were going to arrest the number one or number two people in each family.
	They did that about two weeks before.
	Well, Chin Giganti, who thought he was number two in the Japanese family, but he wasn't.
	Because everybody hated him.
	They told him he was number two.
	He was like number eight.
	Chin is the guy who walks around in the robes and acts like he was crazy.
	Well, he was crazy.
	He was a borderline personality disorder in the military.
	He was actually, I think, officially diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic.
	He was.
	Yeah.
	But he played it up.
	So this information comes out.
	One of the agents comes in and tells you that you can't believe this.
	Chin checked himself in a hospital.
	He thinks we're going to arrest him.
	It can be very disappointing when we don't arrest him.
	Did you end up with it?
	Eventually, but not for that.
	I got it.
	But not for that.
	So it displayed to the whole world.
	They've been lying to him for several years.
	Tell you, Shin, you're number two.
	You're number two.
	Yeah, I wanted to, yeah, forget Chin's praiser.
	You know, listen to Chin.
	Wow.
	Fat Tony knew he was nuts.
	So he made him think he was number two.
	But he never, he said, how come I don't go to the, how come I don't go to the The commission meetings, I'm number two.
	They say, you know, Chin, you're too high profile.
	With that bathrobe and all that stuff.
	If they see you walking in, they'll know where we're having the meetings.
	Thoughts?
	I have to disagree with that.
	Really?
	Yes.
	Why is that?
	Kai, can you pull up a picture of this guy?
	Shinjikanti?
	Shin was number one.
	Shin was number one.
	Absolutely.
	He was the real power behind the Genebees family.
	Did you ever have a dealing with him?
	I did.
	How was he as an individual?
	You know, we walked down Houston Street together, and he was in his bathrobe, hair musked up.
	He didn't shave.
	Go back.
	Slippers.
	Bathrobe.
	But he was as lucid and as intelligent as anybody could be.
	You know, my father was thrown out in the military, being a military being, paranoid, schizophrenic with homicidal tendencies.
	Now, was my dad?
	Maybe the homicidal tendencies, but he wasn't schizophrenic.
	So listen, you know, people ask me all the time, was Chin really, you know, goofy?
	And listen, to play goofy for 30 years, you got to have a little bit of craziness in you.
	But he was sharp as a fucking.
	Oh, you think that was a ruse?
	He was putting on a ruse?
	100%.
	Really?
	100%.
	100% ruse.
	They have hours and hours and hours of taps.
	Explain how that guy could get that wrong.
	I don't know where he got that information from.
	I don't know.
	And look, even Fat Tony.
	I mean, Fat Tony was the boss, but he consulted with Chin all the time.
	Michael, let me ask you.
	You said your boss put a contract out on your life.
	Yes.
	So this is a two-part question.
	What does that mean, actually, in reality?
	And what was the most you feared for your life in your entire years of being in the mob?
	Well, because I walked away from the life, I basically betrayed my oath, and Persigo put a hit out on me.
	I mean, the feds told me that.
	They said my father went along with it.
	You know, I mean, I had all of that when I was in prison.
	That's why they locked me down.
	They put me in administrative detention.
	But let me tell you the deal.
	You know, one of the horrors of that life, Adam, you make a mistake.
	Your best friend walks you into a room.
	You don't walk out again.
	Your best friend?
	Your best friend or somebody close to you, obviously unsuspecting, right?
	You walk into a room, you don't walk out.
	Well, I had that experience one night.
	And if you want, you know, I can take a minute to describe it.
	It was all gas business stuff.
	A story came out, I believe it was in Newsday, I'm not positive, that said that I was getting powerful enough to break away from the Columbos and start my home family.
	Total nonsense.
	It was ridiculous.
	It was fiction.
	It was no semblance of reality to it.
	But, you know, I started.
	Real quick, how does something like that become news?
	Is there like a competitor that decides we're going to screw with Michael or let's leak some?
	You know, sometimes reporters just create, I mean, I can tell you so many stories that there was just no truth to them.
	They just create these things, you know.
	I was pretty high profile.
	I was getting a lot of attention.
	And so guys, you know, on the street, hey, you know what I mean?
	He's turning in this amount of money.
	Maybe there's more.
	And it said I was making $2 billion.
	That was not true.
	And so, you know, Persico started questioning some of my Russian partners.
	And, you know, word was going around on the streets.
	So my dad was out on parole.
	And he calls me up.
	And he said, look, we got to go to a meeting.
	I go to his house.
	We're in the driveway speaking.
	He says, Junior wants to see us tonight.
	I said, okay.
	I said, what time do you want me to pick you up?
	Because my dad was on parole.
	He only traveled with me because I tried to keep him safe.
	And he said, Mike, they want this a little bit differently.
	They want me to come in first.
	They want you to come in second.
	Long story short, I was a poet.
	I said, Dad, you know the talk on the street.
	Why are they going to let him separate us?
	Let's go together.
	We were both captains at that point in time.
	We argued about it in the driveway.
	I think I might have told you this, Patrick.
	I said, you know what, Dad, I don't agree with you, but I've been listening to you all my life.
	If that's what you want, fine.
	So I drive in.
	It was late at night.
	We had to meet Junior in a house in Brooklyn because it was a covert meeting.
	He was on parole.
	Didn't want to get violated.
	So Jimmy Angelina, who's another captain of the family, I meet him in Brooklyn.
	He says, get in my car.
	We're going to drive to where the meeting is.
	I get in the car.
	There's somebody sitting in the back seat.
	I recognize him, but I didn't know really who he was.
	Jimmy don't even introduce me.
	I get in the car.
	And he's very close-mouthed.
	He's not really talking.
	You know, he starts talking about the Yankees.
	You know, I'm a die-hard Yankee.
	I didn't want to hear about the Yankees at night.
	We get to the house in Brooklyn.
	It was late at night.
	And it was about a 30-yard walk from the car to the basement apartment that we had to go into.
	And I get out of the car.
	I'm assuming Jimmy's behind me and maybe the other guy behind him.
	And I'll be honest, I'm getting scared.
	I said, this is a bad setup.
	What's going on here?
	Now I'm thinking everything's going through my head.
	I'll be honest with you.
	When I recount this, I can smell the fragrance.
	It was an August night.
	And I can hear the crickets chirping.
	That's how real this was.
	Yes.
	And I'm walking down those steps and I'm scared.
	I mean, my knees are starting to buckle.
	I mean it.
	Because when that door opens, I said, the last thing I'm going to see.
	You've got to understand.
	I mean, I've been around since it drives.
	You were keenly aware of it at that moment.
	Very aware of it.
	Why didn't you run?
	You know, people have asked me, Michael, why didn't you cut and run?
	And it wasn't heroic.
	It was robotic.
	You just become so much a product of that life.
	You say, well, if this is it, this is it, you know?
	And that's what I honestly thought.
	You know, I walk in the door.
	Obviously, I'm here, because if it would have went the other way, I would have walked in the door.
	It would have been over.
	But so we have this whole big thing in there questioning me about the gas business and so on and so forth.
	And I started getting mad.
	I started getting angry because you got to understand, I'm turning in a lot of money, a lot of money.
	And this was my deal.
	I mean, I put it together.
	But then I said, wait a minute, I'm here with the boss.
	Let me calm down.
	You know, it looks like I'm going to walk out of here.
	And we get in the car.
	And, you know, I was really angry with Jimmy.
	I turned to him and I was really.
	He's your friend, Jim.
	He's a good friend.
	And he says, stop, wait, don't say anything.
	I said, what?
	He said, you know, you held yourself pretty good in there tonight, Michael.
	This could have been a real problem.
	And so now I got even more mad.
	I said, you knew this?
	You're my friend.
	I know you my whole life.
	You don't tell me anything?
	So he looked at me, he was a smart guy, and he said, if it was the other way around, would you have told me?
	And I thought about it, and I said, no.
	Damn.
	He said, you know, he says, this is the life we live, Michael.
	He said, you know it as well as anybody.
	You grew up in it.
	And then I walked out of the car.
	I don't know if I ever told you this.
	I didn't know what to say.
	I was kind of speechless for a minute.
	I go to get out of the car and he grabs my arm and he says to me, I'm going to tell you something.
	You're not going to want to hear this, but it's the truth, Michael.
	I said, what?
	He said, your father was in there before you tonight.
	He didn't help you one bit.
	Oh, my God.
	He hurt you.
	Okay, with that in mind.
	Well, here's what happened.
	I'm walking back to the car and I'm saying, what could my, then now that's all I was focused on.
	What could my dad could have done?
	But knowing him so well, I know what he did.
	Hey, my son does everything.
	I'm on parole.
	If he's stealing money, I have no idea.
	He just threw me under the bus.
	He didn't back me up.
	Why?
	At all.
	I don't know why.
	I'll be honest.
	I don't know why.
	I never said a word to him about this.
	I just kept it in.
	You never brought it up to him?
	No, I never said a word.
	But when I was writing my first book, I put it in the book.
	I had to.
	It was too much of an impact on my life.
	Because I'll tell you this, if that incident did not happen, I don't think I would have ever walked away from the life.
	It was my dad's betrayal in that regard.
	Now, he denied it.
	That's not true.
	He denied it.
	But I knew it was true.
	But I said to myself, if this life can separate father and son, what do we really have here?
	But the point being is after that experience, nothing really scared me.
	So what I did when I left the life, I said, okay, they're not going to walk me into a room.
	I'm moving to California.
	I said, they're going to have to send a hit squad to come and get me.
	And I'm prepared.
	I'm not going to walk my dog at the same time every morning.
	I'm not going to go to the same restaurant.
	I'm going to stay out of clubs.
	I'm going to be very disciplined.
	They're going to have to work hard to get me.
	So I never was in fear after that time.
	I just was careful.
	You talk about respect and loyalty a lot, right?
	But is there any trust or even friendship in this life?
	You know, there is.
	I had friends, and I had, you know, I trusted in people.
	But you got to understand something.
	When a boss gives you an order, it doesn't matter.
	That's it.
	I mean, look, I had an experience.
	I had a very dear friend of mine that got killed.
	And I believe he got killed for the wrong reasons.
	And I could not save him.
	And they warned me.
	They said, if you warn him, you're in trouble.
	And, you know, I mean, I still live with that today.
	That's a horrible, horrible thing.
	But that's the thing.
	The oath comes before anything.
	And if you're given an order, you got to do it or you suffer for it.
	Well, my God, you know, and I really apologize if this comes off as disrespectful, so forgive me.
	But I mean, how could you ever look at your father the same way?
	I mean, how could you ever, I mean, you're a father.
	You just had your fourth child.
	Is there anything in the world where you wouldn't take me instead?
	Like, my God.
	Like, why would you, what would ever cause you to?
	That's why Sonny, the guy did 55 years.
	He didn't need to do 55 years.
	Sonny could have easily worked with anybody.
	And you're not dealing with a regular guy.
	You're dealing with a true believer mafia, like Mopster.
	Like, that's my opinion.
	I think you may say part of it that's a true believer, but he sounds like a religious history.
	The articles written about Sonny are very different than anybody else.
	Patrick, let me tell you this about my dad.
	This is the truth.
	And listen, I love my dad.
	I love him, like, forget it, you know.
	But I'm telling the truth about him.
	My dad's legacy in that life meant more to him than anybody else.
	That's what I'm saying.
	He just wanted to be known as the stand-up guy.
	Now, you know, all the good things he said to you about those guys?
	When he talked to me, this life is full of shit, Michael.
	I mean, he would tell me just like that.
	Oh, yeah, life is like a wheel.
	It's going to turn.
	The guy that loves you today is going to hate you tomorrow.
	We would go through it.
	And he educated me, which was great.
	Good feedback, by the way, with some of that.
	Whatever he told me was spot on.
	There's no doubt about it.
	But I had a conversation with my dad once, you know, and I said, Dad, you know, you don't understand.
	You destroyed the whole family.
	He got very insulted.
	I said, my mom, 33 years without a husband, it's your basket case.
	My sister dies of an overdose of drugs, 27 years old.
	My brother, drug addict, 25 years, turns into an informant.
	I said, you got to claim some responsibility for this.
	He said, no way.
	I was framed.
	If I wasn't framed, none of this would have happened.
	I said, but dad, you weren't framed because you were a doctor, a lawyer, or a priest.
	This is the life we live.
	They're coming after us.
	And you sacrificed your entire family.
	He got very upset.
	He probably got upset because he got up.
	Very upset.
	You were close to the bullseye.
	He got very upset with me.
	He would never accept responsibility.
	And that's what kind of, you know, I was always, my mom and dad had a very chaotic relationship.
	They were always back and forth.
	They loved each other, but it was always a lot of hostility in the house.
	And I would always side with my dad, always side with my dad.
	And then towards the end of my mom's life, I started to listen to her a little bit.
	I started to see things a little differently.
	So, when I would approach my dad with that, he would get upset with me.
	Michael, for those of us that have no clue about this.
	We're on time.
	I have one other topic I want to go with.
	So, if you want to wrap this up, I got one other question I got for you.
	But please, if you want to wrap up.
	No, so you know, look, I mean, I love my dad till the end, but we had a difference.
	I mean, that really impacted me, obviously, you know, that whole situation.
	So, it was just different between us.
	More power to you for being, you've been married now for how many years?
	37.
	37 years, five kids.
	You have seven total, right?
	Your family is happy.
	They love you.
	You see them wanting to be around you.
	That's the biggest way to judge a father or a parent if the kids still love the dad after 20, 30 years, their pops and moms.
	They did some right if they want to be around them.
	So, that props goes to you.
	But I'm telling you, from my experience, when I was spending those three days with your dad, those three times that we were with him, very different.
	I've not met many people like him.
	He was a fully like true believer, like a general, like a Jack Nicholson from a few good men.
	That's like, what are you talking about?
	This is like to that point of conviction, duty, very dutiful, very dutiful to him.
	Now, listen, that doesn't mean other people believe that.
	That doesn't mean, you know, you live that life.
	That just means that's how his question for you about two characters.
	I'm curious to know if you have anything to say about this.
	One is Johnny Russo, one is John E. Light.
	Both of them have been on Valettain.
	Both of them have gotten millions of views.
	John A. Light, you know, he's, you know, especially right now with the interview taking place, Mafia States of America.
	There's a lot of people making videos.
	They're happy.
	Some are not happy.
	Some are calling you out.
	Some are calling Michael out.
	There's a lot.
	Some are calling Sammy out.
	What can you say from your experience?
	You guys were both in, was it Rip City, New York?
	I don't know what that documentary was.
	Both of you guys were Rip City, as I'm thinking about basketball.
	Yeah, Trailblazer.
	So what is your point of view of John A. Light?
	Everywhere I go when I run into Albanians, they adore, they admire him.
	What can you say about John?
	Patrick, I never met the guy.
	I never heard of the guy.
	I never knew anything about him until he came up on social media.
	For some reason, he decided to make comments about me.
	Again, I don't know anybody that knew him.
	I don't know anything about him.
	And I've always said to myself, I'm not going to make my name by knocking other people.
	I'm going to leave it at that.
	I have really nothing to say about him.
	How about Johnny?
	How about Johnny Russo?
	Johnny Russo, I mean, he's almost a comedy act.
	I mean, this guy has done everything in the history of the United States and beyond.
	I never met him either.
	I don't know anything about him.
	He says a lot of things that happened, you know, during the making of The Godfather.
	I was around.
	I never seen him.
	I'm not saying he didn't show up, but I think a lot of the things that he's saying are just, he's an actor.
	What more can I say?
	I mean, some of the stories is just, by the way, another great storyteller of what he's.
	I'm unfamiliar.
	He said something about.
	He's still to go watch it.
	Like Saddam Hussein, he sat in the same chair as Saddam Hussein.
	Stuff he did with the Shah.
	And by the way, the way he tells the story, it's so detailed that's like, you know, it's extremely detailed on how he tells.
	I told him when I sat down with him, I said, Johnny, first of all, I enjoy being around you because you're so entertaining.
	I said, but if 10% of the stories you're telling me is true, you lived a ridiculous lives.
	He's the mafia Forrest Gump.
	He said one story about Joe Colombo blowing up the gates of Paramount Studios.
	And that would be huge news.
	I never heard that happen ever.
	And I was around during the whole Colombo Godfather thing, I never heard any of that stuff.
	He spoke very highly of your props, very highly of your pops.
	Like, you know, who he was and what he had to say.
	I doubt my father ever met him.
	Okay.
	Got it.
	So let's just do this because Mafia States of America is going to come out here soon.
	We don't know the dates.
	We're going to reveal it.
	And who knows?
	Maybe even we end up doing a live event together with me, you, Sammy, Chas.
	Who knows?
	Maybe Rudy at the Fountain Blue in South Florida and invite and tickets.
	I don't know.
	That would be an interesting live event if we did something like that.
	So maybe after all the episodes are live and people have seen it, then maybe we may do something live.
	It's not everyone's going to be able to attend because that place only fits about 800.
	But I can only imagine what types of people would come then and the kind of security we're going to need for us to conduct that thing.
	But the first thing that we are, I want to show you this.
	So this is a coffee mug that says Mafia States of America.
	And here's how it works.
	When you're having the coffee and you put your coffee in there or your tea, this is what happens to the mug, which is pretty cool.
	I don't know if it's happening yet or not.
	Oh, yeah.
	I see an image.
	Yes.
	Yeah.
	Gradually the image comes out.
	That is cool.
	That is pretty cool on Mafia States of America.
	And the longer it sits, the more evident it becomes with the mug where you see literally the thumbnail of our sit-down.
	So this water is not that hot.
	I'm putting my finger and it's not burning.
	So it's Sammy and I on the same?
	Yeah.
	So it's the mug comes out with you and Sammy.
	It's literally a mug by the way.
	Yeah, there it is.
	That is pretty sick.
	I'm going to hold it here so folks can see it.
	So before I did this, I don't know if you want to hold this camera.
	When you get into the gas business, did you ever think you'd have your own merch?
	No.
	Never.
	You're going to bring it close.
	So first, it looked like this.
	Wow.
	Just a black coffee mug.
	Then you put the hot water, the hot tea, or the coffee in it.
	Next thing you know, Sammy shows up.
	Michael shows up with Mafia States of America.
	It's really, really cool.
	That is cool.
	Yeah, it's really cool.
	Who came up with this idea?
	Well, the guy who did it, you know, we've done some work with them, but we set this up.
	Kai and Mario dealt with them, put it together, so it's pretty exciting.
	For folks who'd like to get this coffee mug, we're going to put the link below.
	Kai, put the link below both in the description and in the chat box for people to find it.
	I think at this point, we're going to sell it later on, but at this point, the first hundred are going to be able to all order one.
	The first hundred that place the order, you're going to get that mug shipped out to you.
	We don't have a big supply today.
	We will once we launch the whole thing, but right now, the first 100, if you click on the link, go order it, you'll get your first limited edition mafia.
	Sammy and I get one free?
	Yeah, we're going to give that to you.
	You don't have to pay for anything, but we're excited about this thing coming out, Michael.
	As usual, you always have an interesting take on any topic we go on.
	I think you're one that you can talk sports, you can talk politics, you can talk business, you can talk mobile history.
	There's not many topics that we can talk.
	I think the only thing we can't talk to Michael about is snowboarding, skiing, cold weather.
	That's the only thing you have no desire to discuss.
	None whatsoever.
	Gang, if you listen to this, if you enjoyed today's interview, smash that subscribe button and the thumbs up button.
	We're going to put Michael's information below as well.
	If you want to go send him a message and follow him on Instagram as well as his YouTube channel, if you've not followed his YouTube channel, it's a must-watch.
	It's a must-subscribe to his channel.
	All that information will be below.
	Michael, once again, thanks for coming on being on the podcast.
	Yes, thank you very much.
	Appreciate you.

▲